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TikTok prepares to shut down app in US on Sunday, sources say

TikTok and its Chinese parent, ByteDance, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

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TikTok plans to shut U.S. operations of its social media app used by 170 million Americans on Sunday, when a federal ban is set to take effect, barring a last-minute reprieve, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported President-elect Donald Trump, whose term begins a day after a ban would start, is considering issuing an executive order to suspend enforcement of a shutdown for 60 to 90 days. The newspaper did not say how Trump could legally do so, Reuters reported.

The law signed in April mandates a ban on new TikTok downloads on Apple (AAPL.O), or Google (GOOGL.O), app stores if Chinese parent ByteDance fails to divest the site.

Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.

The Trump transition team did not have an immediate comment. Trump has said he should have time after taking office to pursue a “political resolution” of the issue.

“TikTok itself is a fantastic platform,” Trump’s incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News on Wednesday. “We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”

A White House official told Reuters Wednesday President Joe Biden has no plans to intervene to block a ban in his final days in office if the Supreme Court fails to act and added Biden is legally unable to intervene absent a credible plan from ByteDance to divest TikTok, read the report.

U.S. Senator Ed Markey on Wednesday sought unanimous consent to extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok by 270 days but Republican Senator Tom Cotton blocked the proposal.

If it is banned, TikTok plans that users attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is not public.

“We go dark. Essentially, the platform shuts down,” TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court last week.

The company also plans to give users an option to download all their data so that they can take a record of their personal information, the sources said.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to uphold the law and allow TikTok to be banned on Sunday, overturn the law, or pause the law to give the court more time to make a decision.

Shutting down TikTok in the U.S. could make it unavailable for users in many other countries, the company said in a court filing last month, because hundreds of service providers in the U.S. help make the platform available to TikTok users around the world – and could no longer do so starting Sunday, Reuters reported.

TikTok said in the court filing an order was needed to “avoid interruption of services for tens of millions of TikTok users outside the United States.”

TikTok had said that the prohibitions would eventually make the app unusable, noting in the filing that “data centers would almost certainly conclude that they can no longer store” TikTok code, content, or data.

The sources said the shutdown aims to protect TikTok service providers from legal liability and make it easier to resume operations if President-elect Donald Trump opted to roll back any ban.

Shutting down such services does not require longer planning, one of the sources said, noting that most operations have been continuing as usual as of this week. If the ban gets reversed later, TikTok would be able to restore service for U.S. users in a relatively short time, sources said.

TikTok and its Chinese parent, ByteDance, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

U.S. tech publication The Information first reported the news late on Tuesday.

Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States, read the report.

President Joe Biden last April signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets by Jan. 19, or face a nationwide ban. Last week, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold the law, despite calls from Trump and lawmakers to extend the deadline.

TikTok and ByteDance have sought, at the very least, a delay in the implementation of the law, which they say violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection against government abridgment of free speech.

TikTok said in the court filing last month it estimated one-third of its 170 million American users would stop accessing the platform if the ban lasted a month.

Science & Technology

Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in nearly 12,000 years

Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan.

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The Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region has erupted for the first time in almost 12,000 years, sending massive ash plumes soaring up to 14 kilometres into the atmosphere, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.

The eruption began on Sunday and lasted several hours. Hayli Gubbi, located around 800 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa near the Eritrean border, sits within the geologically active Rift Valley, where two major tectonic plates meet. The volcano rises roughly 500 metres above the surrounding landscape.

Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan. Satellite imagery and social-media videos captured a towering column of white smoke billowing into the sky.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program notes that Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptions during the Holocene, the period dating back about 12,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age.

Volcanologist Simon Carn of Michigan Technological University also confirmed on Bluesky that the volcano had “no record of Holocene eruptions.”

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Cloudflare outage easing after millions of internet users affected

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A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday afternoon after preventing people from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat, were inaccessible due to the disruption.

Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.

The latest outage prevented users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement.

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. – REUTERS

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China sends its youngest astronaut to ‘Heavenly Palace’ space station

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China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew including the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.

It was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since it was completed in 2022, Reuters reported.

Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft involve trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts increasingly replaced by younger faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be sent to space – were picked to participate in the programme in 2020.

Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.

FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON SPACE STATION

The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and worked on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace”, for more than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.

The Shenzhou-21 crew were also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in experiments on reproduction in low Earth orbit.

Biannual launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou programme, which has in the past year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.

The rapid advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon again before China does.

Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up against the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.

 

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