A U.S. appeals court on Friday ruled against TikTok’s emergency request to delay enforcement of a law that could lead to the app’s ban. As a result, its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, must sell TikTok’s ownership by January 19 or face a potential prohibition, Reuters reports.
Earlier this week, TikTok and ByteDance had filed an emergency petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeking more time to bring their case before the Supreme Court. The company warned that without a court intervention, the enforcement of the law would shut down a platform currently used by 170 million monthly users in the United States.
However, the court ruled on Friday that TikTok and ByteDance failed to present any precedent where a law’s enforcement was delayed after being deemed constitutional by the courts.
A TikTok spokesperson announced that the company plans to take its case to the Supreme Court following the ruling.
Under the new law, ByteDance must divest its ownership of TikTok by January 19 to avoid a ban. The law also grants the U.S. government the authority to ban other foreign-owned apps over concerns about the collection of Americans’ data.
The U.S. government has described TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance, as a national security threat. TikTok, however, insists that its data and content management are based in the United States and stored in Oracle-operated cloud servers.
