TikTok Stays Online in the US But Faces Increased Competition

TikTok briefly shut down in the US over the weekend after the law that gave TikTok until January 19th to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance came into force. For a couple of hours, TikTok stopped working in the US and could not be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play Store, but it’s now back online.

Yesterday, President-elect Donald Trump stated that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order,” Trump wrote on his own Truth Social platform.

Trump also suggested the creation of a new joint venture where the US government would get 50% ownership of the app and leave the other half to “the current owners and/or new owners.” However, many things are still up in the air as it’s still unclear how this would work in practice and if ByteDance would ever agree to this joint venture solution.

While the future of TikTok in the US is still unclear as of this writing, its competitors aren’t resting on their laurels. On Threads, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri detailed several updates directly inspired by the TikTok experience: Instagram reels videos can now be up to three minutes long, and the app’s Reels tab is getting a new feed of reels where users can see the videos their friends have liked or added notes to. Mosseri also announced the upcoming launch of Edits, a video editing app that replicates most of the features of ByteDance’s popular Capcut app.

Instagram reels and Youtube Shorts are probably the best alternatives to TikTok’s popular vertical video format right now. However, other social media apps like Twitter/X and Bluesky also want to their share of the pie. X has just started rolling out a new Video tab to US users today, while Bluesky is adding custom feeds for video posts While this isn’t exactly new, the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also added a video tab with TikTok-style videos last year.