History repeats itself, quickly it seems, as U.S. President Trump confirms that Microsoft is indeed in the running to buy TikTok. Over the weekend, we shared reports that Microsoft and Oracle were both vying to lock down TikTok.

TikTok held firm and refused to be sold, Congress blinked, and now everyone is scrambling to avoid a backlash from its younger user base.

DeepSeek, the Chinese-owned ChatGPT rival, could pose the same national security concerns that Congress has about TikTok, Philip Elliott writes.

President Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that halts the ban on TikTok. But is TikTok actually "saved?"

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated on the dais at Trump’s inauguration Monday, signaling a budding alliance with the president. Massie, the Republican who co-sponsored the bill to repeal the ban, posted a photo he’d taken of Chew from the crowd on X. “Tick tock, the TikTok ban is about to end,” Massie wrote.

We (sort of) answer the burning questions about TikTok, which is back online in the United States (sort of). TikTok is back online — sort of. But also it’s still banned. Huh? You probably have some questions about this whole thing with TikTok. I (sort of) have answers.

After hearing arguments on Friday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to uphold the law, meaning that TikTok will be banned effective if the parent company ByteDance does not sell the company by Sunday.

The popular video app went dark in the United States late Saturday and then came back around noon on Sunday, even as a law banning it took effect.

Under the deal being negotiated by the White House, TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, would retain a stake in the company, but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok’s Web infrastructure, one of the sources told Reuters.

When the Supreme Court upheld a law that banned TikTok from the US, it seemed well aware that its ruling could resonate far beyond one app. The justices delivered an unsigned opinion with a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1944: “in considering the application of established legal rules to the ‘totally new problems’ raised by the airplane and radio,

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, accordin

Despite all of this, Trump has decided that the best course of action is to delay the shutdown of TikTok, even though he was one of the first to endorse a ban. His reason for the delay is that he wants to broker a sale, but that doesn’t explain his flipping from leading the charge on a ban to trying to save it.