China’s ByteDance gets new extension of TikTok sale order as deadline slides
- The parent company has been under pressure to finalise deal with Walmart and Oracle to shift popular video app’s US assets into a new entity
- Friday deadline has now been moved to December 4
According to a court filing, ByteDance said the US government entity the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has granted the company the extension to sell TikTok to American buyers Oracle and Walmart.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August to compel the sale of the ultra popular Chinese app, which has more than 100 million American users, claiming the platform’s Chinese owner could be forced to hand over a massive amount of US user data to Beijing and posed a national security threat.
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Trump’s order set the deadline for TikTok to be sold by November 12, which was extended by CFIUS to November 27.
A representative for TikTok did not immediately comment.
TikTok was caught in the middle of the worsening US China tech war that began with Huawei Technologies and ZTE getting on the blacklist as national security threats.
In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled a five-pronged Clean Network initiative aimed at blocking Chinese cloud service providers, telecommunications carriers and social media platforms like TikTok and another tech giant Tencent’s WeChat. Pompeo called the providers owned by China “malign actors” on ideological grounds.
Under pressure from the US government, ByteDance – which has repeatedly denied wrongdoing – has been in talks for months to finalise a deal to sell a minority stake to Oracle and Walmart in the hopes of assuaging US national security concerns.