Within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending the enforcement of a TikTok ban that had taken effect the previous day. The move tossed a lifeline to TikTok -- and its 170 million users in the United States.

Legal experts said despite Trump's order, service providers and app distributors such as Google and Apple still face major uncertainty and potential massive financial liability for defying a law that banned TikTok in the United States unless Chinese parent ByteDance divested the company by Jan.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is open to Elon Musk buying TikTok, and floated a proposal that the United States jointly own half the company. “I would be, if he wanted to buy it, yes,” Trump told reporters at a White House event announcing a new AI infrastructure private sector partnership with tech leaders,

"I have been against a TikTok ban for a long time, because it goes against freedom of speech. That said, the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X

Three days after ByteDance's TikTok went dark and then was quickly revived in the United States, users who deleted the app were anxiously checking iPhone and Android devices to find it still unavailable to be downloaded again.

TikTok restored access to U.S. users Sunday afternoon following a brief outage, after a federal law took effect that bans companies from hosting TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps unless ByteDance divests from the apps,

ByteDance restored TikTok service in the United States on Sunday night, but major tech companies like Apple and Google have yet to restore downloads of the app. With no way to update TikTok, app rot may soon set in.