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TikTok is not banned in the United States. After a chaotic start to 2025, a brief shutdown, weeks of being missing from the app stores, and months of political back-and-forth, the app's US operations are now run by a new, majority-American-owned company. Here's how the saga played out, and where things stand as of September 2026.
The shutdown and the scramble back (January 2025)
The trouble started with the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a law signed in April 2024 that gave TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, until 19 January 2025 to sell its US operations or be banned outright. The US Supreme Court upheld the law on 17 January 2025, and TikTok went dark for its roughly 170 million US users the night before the deadline.
Service came back online around 12 hours later, after Donald Trump, hours from taking office, said he wouldn't enforce the ban immediately. But Apple and Google kept TikTok off the App Store and Google Play for weeks anyway, wary of legal liability for distributing it. The app didn't reappear in either app store until 13 February 2025, after Trump signed an executive order pausing enforcement and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, wrote to both companies confirming they wouldn't be penalised for hosting it.
The Oracle-led deal that settled things
Trump extended that enforcement pause several times through 2025 while a divestment deal was negotiated. It finally closed on 22 January 2026, when TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the new US entity, was officially established.
Under the deal, a consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Abu Dhabi-backed MGX fund holds roughly 45% of TikTok's US business, existing ByteDance investors hold most of the remaining stake, and ByteDance itself was cut down to under 20% ownership, satisfying the law's divestment requirement. Oracle also took on the role of security partner, auditing the app's data handling and overseeing a rebuilt, US-run recommendation algorithm that ByteDance no longer controls. TikTok's US operations were valued at roughly $14 billion as part of the deal.
For everyday users, the change has mostly been invisible, nobody had to download a new app, and TikTok looks and works the same as before. The real shift happened behind the scenes: American ownership and oversight now sit over the algorithm and user data that used to run through ByteDance.
