TikTok shuts down in the U.S.
TikTok shuts down in the U.S.
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TikTok shuts down in the U.S. (updated)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

TikTok just ran out of tiktoks as the countdown ended for the app’s time in the U.S. In the early hours of January 19, the wildly popular short-form video app went dark.

The shutdown left me (and millions of other users) in shock as they were greeted with a message saying, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now” or an image that I could not flick away. I don’t know what my 418 followers are going to do now. Seriously, the service is the drama of the moment, as the shutdown came after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and upheld a law passed by Congress last year, which required ByteDance, to either divest TikTok or face a ban.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.