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.

The TikTok ban was supposed to be a critical national security response to the threat posed by the Chinese government and its control over an app with 170 million users in our country. Shortly before the law went into effect,

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.

Rep. Mike Turner, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said TikTok "remains a national security threat" despite President Trump's effort to maintain access to the popular video-sharing app in recent days.

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.

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.