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By Stephen Nellis, Max A. Cherney
(Reuters) -Social media app TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, will be banned in the United States on Sunday unless a deal comes together to sell it to a U.S. investor or the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.
The ban results from an April law signed by President Joe Biden and is the first time the United States has attempted to shut down access to an app with such a large user base - roughly 170 million domestic users.
To pull it off, the law targets a wide swath of U.S.-based partners that help bring TikTok to users, rendering most easy workarounds such as using a virtual private network or changing a phone's country settings moot or difficult to use, experts told Reuters.
At best, users might be able to access a web-based version of the service that has fewer features than the app, and even that might not work, experts said.
Here's a closer look at how the ban will be implemented.
APP 'ROTS'
The law will not force users to delete the app. But TikTok plans to shut down the service and will show users a message about the law and offer to let them download their personal data, Reuters previously reported.
Even if TikTok was not planning a formal shutdown, the app would not work as well as it did before. App store providers are explicitly barred from distributing TikTok to U.S. users, which means that Apple and Alphabet's Google will remove the app from their stores and will no longer distribute updates to fix bugs.
The TikTok app also relies on a constant flow of new videos, which would become nearly impossible to deliver. TikTok data for U.S. users is hosted and processed on servers owned by Oracle, which most experts believe Oracle would have to cease those operations.
Oracle, Apple, Google and TikTok all either declined to comment or did not return requests for comment.
Beyond that, analyses have shown that more than 100 other service providers, such as content delivery networks, help make TikTok operate smoothly.
"Some subset of that stuff that is required for the app to actually work, both in terms of getting video to you, but also in terms of getting video and content up," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a distinguished technologist with nonprofit group Internet Society. "And so uploading might be one of the first things to go. Americans may only be able to watch as their app rots."
The disengagement of those service providers could also affect tens of millions of TikTok users outside the U.S., but company engineers are working to address those issues, sources told Reuters.