Hours are ticking for TikTok: Without Biden’s guarantee, we will have to stop working in the US tomorrow

TikTok warned on Friday that it will be forced to shut down on Sunday unless President Joe Biden’s administration provides assurances to companies like Apple and Google that it will not face enforcement action when the platform is banned in the US. coming into force on the said day.

The statement came hours after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok in the United States on national security grounds unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it to an approved American buyer, which it continues to refuse.

With this decision, the popular app for short videos threatens to disappear tomorrow.

Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Oracle and others could face huge fines if they continue to provide services to TikTok after the ban takes effect.

“If the Biden administration does not immediately provide a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers and default, TikTok will, unfortunately, be forced to cease operations on January 19,” they ordered from the company.

The court decision throws the platform and its 170 million American users into uncertainty, and its fate in the hands of Donald Trump, who has promised to save TikTok after he returns to the presidency on Monday.

The law was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress last year and signed by Biden, although a growing number of lawmakers who voted for it now want TikTok to continue operating in the United States.

TikTok, ByteDance and some of the app’s users challenged the law, but the Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government restrictions on free speech, as they argued.

Trump, who tried to ban TikTok in 2020, said he plans to take steps to save the app.

“My decision on TikTok will be made in the not-too-distant future, but I need to have time to review the situation. Stay tuned,” Trump said in a social media post on Friday. spoke by phone with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China’s ownership of TikTok has raised concerns among U.S. politicians for years, with lawmakers and the Biden administration saying China could use TikTok to collect data on millions of Americans for harassment, recruitment and spying. and the fight against this platform took place at a time of growing trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.