At 9:30 on the 19th, Western Time, TikTok issued a statement on social media saying that the company had reached an agreement with the Internet service provider and was restoring related services. The TikTok app has returned to normal use, and the TikTok website has also returned to normal.
On January 19th, after American tennis player Gauff successfully advanced to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, she wrote "RIP TikTok USA" when signing her name on the camera lens.
This young girl born in 2004 is a loyal user of TikTok and has been using this app since the musical.ly era. After the game, she specially opened her TikTok to check it - thinking that she was in Australia and would not be affected by the suspension of service, but her app still received a pop-up notification of suspension of service.
On January 17th, local time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in support of the forced sale order against TikTok. At midnight on January 19th, TikTok pushed a message to American users saying, "Sorry, TikTok is currently unavailable. The United States has enacted a law banning TikTok."
Currently, TikTok has about 170 million users in the United States, mostly young people. Before the U.S. Supreme Court made its ruling, local media had already received news that TikTok would be shut down on January 19th.
Starting on January 14th, a large number of American users poured into other platforms in China to express protest. A user named "Drewpark2k" posted a video saying that Americans would rather learn to read Chinese than use American social apps such as Meta and X. Many other users posted videos saying: "The U.S. government says it is afraid that the Chinese government will obtain user data from TikTok. I want to hand my data directly to the Chinese government."
After TikTok was banned, a large number of users also expressed regret on the X platform. Many users said that they learned a lot of professional and job-hunting knowledge on TikTok and received a lot of help.
According to reports from the "San Francisco Chronicle" and other media on the 19th, many American users found that they could not log in to TikTok and began to call 911 to seek help from the police. Police in many places said: Stop calling. According to the latest news, TikTok has resumed normal use 14 hours after it was shut down.
According to reports, on the 18th local time, American users experienced a night without TikTok. Multiple police departments in Oregon, Ohio, Minnesota and Alabama issued statements to persuade TikTok users (mainly children and teenagers) who are troubled by this to stop calling the police.
In addition, the Santa Clara Police Department in California issued a public statement, jokingly saying: "We are patrolling to make sure everyone is okay on this difficult night without TikTok. We understand when you can't browse the dance challenge, Cooking skills, or that one trying to make tortillas with a hair dryer (video), it's hard. Stay strong, Santa Clara. Be optimistic and TikTok may be back online, and your ability to spend two hours watching raccoons build treehouses will be restored. "Keep calm and take a deep breath," the statement continued. If you need us, we will be there, but please don’t call 911 about TikTok being down.”
In 2023, TikTok Shop was banned in Indonesia. At the end of September, then-Indonesian President Joko Widodo officially banned direct sales transactions on social media platforms “like TikTok” at a cabinet meeting. On October 4th, TikTok Shop was officially shut down in Indonesia.
After being banned, the solution given by TikTok Shop was to merge with Tokopedia, an e-commerce platform under the Indonesian GoTo Group. The merged Tokopedia is controlled by TikTok, and the entity TikTok holds 75% of the shares and has control. TikTok has promised to invest US$1.5 billion in the future to provide financial support for business development and provide more assistance to small and medium-sized merchants in terms of marketing, branding and internationalization.
In the Indonesian market where political and business relations are complicated, TikTok Shop was finally able to reverse the situation and re-launch the service after being suspended for two months, proving its management team's capabilities in market insight, strategy and negotiation.
