I’m not sure this is correct. I see where you’re coming from, but there was a clear date that the law was going to be enacted by, and tiktok simply followed that date. Pretty much everybody expected tiktok to be required to shut down. The law is clear that there are penalties for tiktok continuing to operate past that date, so it’s not really surprising.
They were telling users who to blame and who to thank because in this specific case, the blame and the thank are pretty clear. The Biden administration approved the ban, and the Trump administration reversed it. Blaming one and thanking the other is also hardly surprising.
Well, "the law" is a shorthand for "how the police behave" and there is a certain amount of realpolitik here. The basic argument here would be that the US Congress made a scary growling sound and TikTok folded immediately because the Congress is terrifying. But then Trump made more of a friendly sound and so they think they can operate a bit longer with some level of safety.
There is no question that TikTok is a politically sensitive app and the US/China are very nearly in the funnel to a major war so a lot of the usual niceties are questionable. Previously the US has attempted something that looked a lot like a black-bag kidnapping of a Chinese industrialist [0]. I'd imagine that the TikTok people are acutely sensitive towards how the law is actually going to be interpreted and enforced in practice.
This is basically the same tactic to the SOPA/PIPA protests [1]. I don't know why people are bending over backwards to pretend it was something other than a political stunt. Also, Trump's rhetoric has remained unchanged since well before this - a 90 day extension. They wanted to flex their muscle to show the US political establishment how many US users there were and how much sway they had to give them more leverage in their negotiations. That's about it.
Jan 17: Biden administration says it will leave TikTok ban enforcement for Trump [1]
Early Jan 18: Trump says he will 'most likely' give TikTok a 90-day extension to avoid a ban [2]
Late Jan 18: TikTok makes app unavailable for U.S. users ahead of ban [3]
Midday Jan 19: TikTok begins restoring service for U.S. users after Trump comments [4]
They already knew what was going to happen. They also changed the message shortly after disabling it from "We're working to restore service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned." to "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Stay tuned!" [5]
If your cloud provider tells you they are shutting you down on date X, you want to fight as hard as you can until X and then shutdown gracefully to have a chance to explain to your users why your system is going down. If you wait until you get shutdown, you have no way of pushing a graceful shutdown anymore.
Oracle has no interest in running afoul of the US government at all. Their internal culture in many ways views them like that of a quasi-government institute. So in thus case they probably are feeling responsible to actually be the ones enforcing the law.
I imagine shutting down ByteDance is not like flipping a switch. They have a mountain of infrastructure and “shutting down” could mean nuking the data or otherwise getting it out of their cloud entirely. If it has to be done by a certain date you’d need to start nuking things well in advance to be absolutely certain you’re in compliance by the deadline. I’m surprised the shutdown happened as late as it did if this wasn’t a completely staged crisis.
That’s a trivial problem to solve though. Just push an update to the app that shows the „we were banned“ message if a specific API endpoint isn’t reachable anymore (and general internet connectivity is still there of course). Then you can operate as normal until your servers are forcefully shut down.
They were telling users who to blame and who to thank because in this specific case, the blame and the thank are pretty clear. The Biden administration approved the ban, and the Trump administration reversed it. Blaming one and thanking the other is also hardly surprising.