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TikTok briefly went offline in the United States over the weekend due to the ban that was set to go into effect on Sunday before Donald Trump pledged to intervene. The outage only lasted for around 12 hours, and you have to imagine the person who was charged with setting a Congressman’s office on fire in Wisconsin in anger feels pretty foolish about that decision.
ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, had around nine months to find a new owner in the United States after the House and Senate passed a law that was signed by Joe Biden last April that would prevent Americans from accessing the platform if it hadn’t changed hands by January 19, 2025.
A sale had not come to fruition with the deadline on the imminent horizon on Saturday night, and anyone who hopped on TikTok shortly before midnight on the East Coast was greeted with a message informing them it could no longer be accessed in the U.S. thanks to the ban.
According to Fox6, police officers and firefighters in Fond du Loc, Wisconsin were dispatched to a strip mall just a few hours later to respond to a fire that had broken out in the local office of Glenn Grothman, a Republican who represents the state’s 6th District in the House of Representative in Washington, D.C.
The blaze was quickly extinguished, and while it caused minor damage to the building, no one was harmed as a result.
It didn’t take long for the responding officers to detain a 19-year-old man from the town of Menasha (located around 40 miles north of the scene) in the vicinity of the building, and he reportedly admitted he had set the fire because he was mad about the TikTok ban (Grothman was one of the 352 members of Congress who voted to approve the bill).
The unidentified suspect was charged with arson and taken to the jail where he was sitting when TikTok rose from the proverbial ashes shortly before noon on Sunday after Donald Trump pledged to sign an executive order extending the deadline for the sale in the wake of his inauguration on Monday.
Awkward.