TikTok says it is officially going dark in the United States now that a federal ban of the app is going into effect. Around 6 PM Pacific time, the app began notifying people in the US, including Verge staffers,

The 170 million TikTok users in the U.S. could be in for a rude awakening come Sunday if they suddenly find the enormously popular video-sharing app is inaccessible because of a law passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress last year.

Leaders at Oracle, the main cloud computing provider for TikTok's U.S. operations, have told some staff to prepare to shut down servers that host U.S. TikTok data as soon as 9 p.m. ET on Saturday (0200 GMT on Sunday) in advance of a U.

TikTok could shut down in the U.S. on Sunday with 170 million American users shut out due to a legal and political standoff. NBC News’ Savannah Sellers reports.

TikTok is set to be banned in the US on 19 January after the Supreme Court denied a last ditch legal bid from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. It found the law banning the social media platform did not violate the first amendment rights of TikTok and its 170 million users, as the companies argued.

On Saturday, TikTok users in the United States scrolled through the app for what could be its final hours after the Supreme Court upheld a law that requires ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app by Sunday or otherwise face a ban.

Social media platform TikTok said it will be "forced to go dark" on Sunday unless the White House gives a "definitive" statement about its future, the company said in an announcement Friday night.

Trump spoke to NBC News' Kristen Welker in an exclusive phone interview Saturday, discussing his plans on what to do about the popular social media app.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at the impacts of the looming TikTok ban in the U.S., including the “TikTok refugees” moving to

NBC News reports that TikTok has boosted advertisements for Lemon8, an application also owned by ByteDance, in recent days. Rival social-media apps and websites such as Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat are expected to increase their user base in the wake of a possible ban.

The Chinese-owned company said it would cut off its services unless the U.S. assures Apple, Google and other companies that they would not be punished for hosting and distributing TikTok.