If you’re a U.S.-based TikTok user who was anxiously counting down the days until the social media app was banned on Dec. 16, 2025, then there’s good news. Christmas came early — you can start counting down the days until Jan. 23 instead.
Dec. 16 was, in theory, the latest deadline for TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, to wrap up a sale of its U.S. business. That was supposed to happen by law (the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024, if you’re feeling formal) on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2025; in fact, there was a brief shutdown.
The deadline has been extended four times, via executive order, since the Trump administration gained power on that date. The first delay took us to April 4, 2025. On that date, another executive order gave ByteDance until June 19, 2025 to sell. Then, guess what: a June 19 executive order pushed the deadline back until Dec. 16, 2025.
In the meantime, we seem to be no closer to a TikTok sale. By multiple accounts, negotiations have become bogged down, in part because the Chinese government takes a dim view of the U.S. strong-arming one of its companies and views the deal as leverage. Not to mention that a constantly-extended deadline isn’t a real deadline at all.
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Trump, who has repeatedly drawn attention to his own following on TikTok, may appear like he’s tactically delaying the ban. But he’s also keen to take credit for the possibility of a sale, and it doesn’t exactly take an international diplomacy expert to see weaknesses in this game of hardball. You just have to know one of 2025’s most popular political truisms: TACO.
Indeed, on Sept. 25, Trump issued another executive order directing the U.S. Attorney General to take “no action for noncompliance” against TikTok for “120 days from the date of this order” — which brings us to Jan. 23, 2026. Why? Because, Trump wrote, “a plan has been presented to me to undergo a qualified divestiture of TikTok’s United States operations.”
That plan was said to involve a $14 billion sale of the U.S. arm of TikTok to a consortium including Oracle, which is led by Trump backer Larry Ellison. But no further details have materialized, and the Chinese government insists the sale isn’t going ahead — leading to widespread confusion.
So will TikTok be officially banned in the U.S. on Jan. 23, 2026, 368 days after the original ban was said to go ahead? Your guess is as good as ours — but given the evidence of the past year, it probably wouldn’t be wise to bet your life savings on it.
