TECH NEWS – The platform running in China under the name Douyin by ByteDance may get to a point where it doesn’t have to be made inaccessible in the US.
TikTok is currently only partially available in the U.S. (Apple refuses to re-upload it to the App Store while the app is owned by China), but the 75-day grace period will expire at some point. If they can’t find a US owner for the company by then (which would require ByteDance’s approval), the popular social platform will go dark again in the US.
Reuters reports that US President Donald Trump has said that Microsoft is allegedly in talks with ByteDance to buy the platform. Previously, Trump had only assured that he would find a way out for the platform, but at the time it was only that he was looking for potential US companies to take over TikTok from ByteDance, which is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
History repeats itself, as this is not the first time we have heard Microsoft in this position: there were plans for the Redmond tech giant to take over TikTok in 2020, but this did not materialize because Donald Trump was replaced by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, so the sale plans went nowhere. Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla, has also been rumored to be a buyer, but TikTok has denied this. By comparison, the Reuters news agency is a much more reliable source…
TikTok has around 170 million US users. If Microsoft buys the platform, it could well be the most expensive acquisition in history (the $68.7 billion spent on Activision’s Blizzard King might seem like a pittance in comparison…). It could even get to the point where the application is built into Windows, installed by default, and running on Windows 12 in the future (because there will definitely be such an OS later).
None of this is official yet!
Source: WCCFTech