Are TikTok users able to access the banned app? Experts explain

As a U.S. ban on TikTok went into effect Sunday, displaced users of the popular social media platform scrambled to find workarounds to access the company’s app and President-elect Donald Trump issued a two-word statement that left them hopeful.

“SAVE TIKTOK!” Trump wrote Sunday morning on his Truth Social platform.

Trump, who will be inaugurated as president on Monday, is considering what executive actions he has available to allow TikTok to keep operating, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

One option is an executive order that could attempt to direct the government not to enforce the law, but that avenue faces legal roadblocks, experts told ABC News, chief of which is that an executive order can’t override a law that Congress has passed and that has now been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Congress passed the measure last spring with overwhelming bipartisan support, granting TikTok a 270-day window to cut its ties with China-based parent company ByteDance or face a ban. Instead of initiating a sale, TikTok pursued a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds, which the Supreme Court rejected on Friday.

Experts who spoke to ABC News said the measure would not penalize individuals for accessing or using the app, even after the ban takes hold.

Here’s what to know about exactly how the ban works, and how users can still access TikTok, according to experts:

How exactly does the TikTok ban work?

The law banning TikTok — the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — cracks down on the app by targeting third-party companies vital to the functioning of the platform.

Specifically, the law restricts app stores and hosting companies, which provide the digital infrastructure on which web services like TikTok depend.

When the ban took hold at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time Sunday, visitors to the platform were greeted with a popup message in the app saying, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

By Sunday morning, App stores run by Apple, Google and Samsung began barring new users from downloading the app and preventing existing users from updating it.

Without updates, the app is expected to degrade in quality over time through inconveniences such as video-loading delays and performance glitches, some experts said.

“If the app were not able to download updates, it would eventually become obsolete,” Qi Liao, a professor of computer science at Central Michigan University, told ABC News.

A separate stipulation also makes it illegal for hosting companies to provide services for TikTok — and the measure offers a fairly broad characterization of such firms.

Hosting companies “may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting,” the law says.

“For you to pull up TikTok content on your phone, somebody has to be hosting that,” said Timothy Edgar, a computer science professor at Brown University and a former national security official.

At least in theory, however, the social media giant could establish partnerships with hosting companies outside the U.S., putting them out of reach of U.S. enforcement, the experts added.

Such a move would keep TikTok available to U.S. users, but the service would likely be slower and glitchier as the digital infrastructure moves further away, they added.

“The whole point of hosting content is to have it close to users,” Edgar said. “It certainly wouldn’t work in any kind of smooth way.”

Considering potential legal liability, TikTok will likely opt against efforts to preserve its U.S.-based platform in modified form, Edgar added. Instead, he said, services may simply come to a halt, as they did in India in the immediate aftermath of the country’s 2020 ban.

TikTok did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

Are TikTok users able to access the app post-ban?

No matter the extent of potential service interruptions, users are still able to access TikTok by using ban workarounds, experts said.

Users who do so will face technical hurdles and reduced app quality, Liao said. For some, that will likely prove a formidable deterrent; but others may seek out TikTok anyway.

“If they really want to use it, the user will find a way to use it,” Liao said.

Users giving it a shot can rest assured that the conduct is perfectly legal, the experts said.

“If you’re an ordinary user with TikTok on your phone, you’re not a criminal,” Edgar said. “There’s no penalty at all.”

ABC News’ Devin Dwyer contributed to this report.