The Trump administration on Wednesday gave the Chinese owner of the short video app, ByteDance, until Dec. 4 to complete an Oracle and Walmart buyout, according to a Treasury Department spokesperson.
“The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) has granted ByteDance a one-week extension … to allow time to consider a revised submission the Committee recently received,” the spokesperson said. .
In an executive order this summer, Trump set November 12 as the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the United States. But as the deadline came and went, confusion reigned over the consequences that might be in store for TikTok. Trump’s executive order did not say that TikTok would be banned if it missed the deadline; in fact, it has no consequences.
Earlier this month, the US government quietly extended that two-week deadline to this Friday, November 27, and has now thrown the can farther down the road.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump called TikTok a danger to national security – a claim the company has denied and cybersecurity experts doubt – he issued another executive order in August that would have made any business relationship with the company illegal.
The US Department of Commerce attempted to enforce this order by attempting to ban downloads of the app in September. The agency also said that by mid-November, internet companies would be banned from carrying TikTok traffic.
Both of these measures were temporarily blocked by federal judges after content creators TikTok and TikTok sued in separate cases to prevent them from coming into effect.
ByteDance’s made-to-order solution, the deal with Walmart and Oracle, would see TikTok reorganized into a new global company headquartered in the US, with US investors accounting for the majority of the ownership of the new company.
Trump tentatively approved the deal in September when it was announced. But the arrangement has not yet been finalized by the US government. (It would also need to be further informed by Chinese regulators.)
For now, until next Friday, TikTok users will still be able to access the app while the Trump administration’s ban remains on hold due to litigation.
CNN’s Vivian Salama, Sherisse Pham and Brian Fung contributed to this report.
