The US government has halted the TikTok ban that was set to come into force from Thursday night, preventing the app from being downloaded in the country. The Commerce Department said it will not enforce an order that would have forced TikTok to shut down, citing an injunction from a federal judge in Pennsylvania last month, reports The Verge.
The ban was halted "pending further legal developments," citing a Philadelphia court ruling from September where three prominent TikTokers had argued the app should be allowed to operate in America. The judge then wrote that "the Commerce Department had likely overstepped its authority when it tried to ban transactions on the platform".
Earlier, the Chinese short-video making app filed a petition in a US Court of Appeals, calling for a review of actions by the Trump administrations Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFUIS). TikTok said it has not heard from the committee in weeks about the November 12 deadline for its parent company ByteDance to sell off US assets over national security concerns.
The Trump committee set the deadline to divest the company of "any tangible or intangible assets or property, wherever located, used to enable or support ByteDance's operation of the TikTok application in the United States”.
TikTok last month got a reprieve from the ban imposed by the Trump administration when a federal judge in Pennsylvania blocked the government from moving ahead with restrictions that would have effectively shut down the app from November 12.
"Today, with the November 12 CFIUS deadline imminent and without an extension in hand, we have no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the US," TikTok had said in a statement.
"We remain committed to working with the Administration -- as we have all along -- to resolve the issues it has raised, but our legal challenge today is a protection to ensure these discussions can take place,” the statement added.
Oracle and Walmart have come together to save TikTok from the ban, forming a new company called TikTok Global which will be headquartered in the US.