• What the law required: The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), signed April 24, 2024, required TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to divest U.S. operations within 270 days (deadline January 19, 2025), with up to a 90‑day presidential extension, or face a ban via app‑store and hosting prohibitions. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Court outcome: TikTok challenged the law; the D.C. Circuit in December 2024 and the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2025 upheld PAFACA’s constitutionality, confirming that TikTok would either need a “qualified divestiture” or be effectively banned in the U.S. after the deadline. (law.justia.com)
• What actually happened to the deadline: Instead of allowing TikTok to be shut down, the President repeatedly used (and arguably stretched) statutory authority to delay enforcement of the ban: enforcement that was to apply January 19, 2025 was pushed to April 5, then June 19, then September 17, and then December 16, 2025, while the White House endorsed a divestiture framework intended to let Americans keep using TikTok. (whitehouse.gov)
• Further extensions and ongoing sale: In September 2025, President Trump approved a divestiture plan and further extended the effective ban date to January 20, 2026, drawing criticism from Senator Ed Markey for repeatedly extending deadlines rather than letting the ban take effect. (reuters.com)
• Status as of late November 2025: TikTok remains available in the United States. ByteDance is in the process of selling roughly 80% of TikTok’s U.S. assets to a consortium led by Oracle and Silver Lake, with ByteDance expected to retain under a 20% stake, but neither a completed divestiture nor a U.S. shutdown has occurred yet. (reuters.com)

Because TikTok has not been shut down in the U.S. under the April 2024 divest‑or‑ban law—and instead continues to operate while working toward a sale—the prediction that TikTok would fail to divest and “just get shut down” is wrong as of November 30, 2025.