The Trump administration on Wednesday gave the short-form video app's Chinese owner, ByteDance, until December 4 to conclude a proposed takeover deal by Oracle and Walmart, according to a spokesperson for the Treasury department.
In an executive order this summer, Trump set November 12 as the hard deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the United States. But as the deadline came and went, confusion reigned over what consequences might be in store for TikTok. Trump's executive order did not say that TikTok would be banned if it missed the deadline; in fact, it outlines no consequences at all.
The U.S. Commerce Department tried to enforce that order by attempting to ban downloads of the app in September. The agency also said that by mid-November, internet companies would be banned from carrying TikTok's traffic. ByteDance's proposed solution to the order, the deal with Walmart and Oracle, would see TikTok reorganized as a new, global company headquartered in the United States, with US investors accounting for a majority of the new company's ownership.