On Jan. 18 students who went to open the TikTok app were met with a pop-up stating “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now,” proving many people’s fears to be true. TikTok was suspended for all American users.

Junior Izzy Simms had already accepted TikToks fate by the time the ban happened.

“I honestly did think it was gonna happen,” Simms said. “Because I feel like all the actions that were being taken to prevent the ban were [happening] too close to the actual date of [Banning] to do anything.”

However, while not being on TikTok himself, history teacher George Walden didn’t think that the ban was going through.

“I didn’t think that it would happen,” Walden said. “Just because it’s such a big phenomenon, I thought that it would be sold to somebody else, but it wasn’t”

Simms runs the theater department’s TikTok account and feels she has lost her title of social media manager.

“I was upset, but I understood it because I understand Tiktok can be bad for kids,” Simms said. “It upset me that the social media for theater split up. The senior runs Instagram, and then the underclassmen run TikTok. So I was essentially being put out of a job for social media until next year when I take over Instagram.” Simms said.

In less than a day, the app’s services were restored in America; however, the app remains off the app store, so anybody who deleted it cannot reinstall it.

Recently, President Trump signed an executive order extending the ban for 75 days to allow a new buyer to be found. Potential buyers include Elon Musk and Mr.Beast, who were both interested in purchasing the platform.

No matter the fate TikTok reaches, Walden believes it won’t have a huge impact on students.

“Students will find other things to occupy their time on their phones,” Walden said. “There are YouTube shorts [and] Instagram Reels. Students will find their own thing. I bet TikTok gets sold, and then it gets repackaged into something else.”