Last night on Saturday, January 18, the United States government made good on its promise to ban TikTok. The ban came from a recently renewed amendment from a Ukraine aid bill that gained bipartisan support, and seemed more likely as TikTok’s owner, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, refused to sell it off to a U.S. company. Users have been pretty stunned to see the ban enforced, in part because this affects more than just the one popular social platform.
U.S. players of the popular mobile game Marvel Snap were hit with a popup message last night (or this morning, if they checked) stating the card trading game was banned in the country. “A law banning [our game] has been enacted in the U.S.,” the popup reads. “Unfortunately, that means you can’t use Marvel Snap right for now. Rest assured, we’re working to restore our service in the U.S. Please stay tuned!” Like with TikTok, this appears to affect players who don’t live in the U.S., but do have an account based in the country, and the game’s app is no longer showing in the iOS or Android stores.
Marvel Snap is published by Nuverse, which is a subsidiary of ByteDance. It, along with other apps (CapCut and Lemon8) and games (One Punch Man: The Strongest, Mission EVO) owned by the company, have similarly been banned in the country for the foreseeable future. At time of writing, Marvel hasn’t commented on the outage, but developer Second Dinner called it “a surprise to us and wasn’t planned.” The studio said the game “isn’t going anywhere,” and it’s “actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share.”
Unfortunately, MARVEL SNAP is temporarily unavailable in U.S. app stores and is unavailable to play in the U.S.
This outage is a surprise to us and wasn’t planned. MARVEL SNAP isn’t going anywhere.
We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will…
— Second Dinner (@seconddinner) January 19, 2025
At the moment, Marvel Snap and TikTok players can only wait for incoming president Donald Trump to reverse the ban against ByteDance products he first called for by executive order back in 2020. Until then, there’s always Marvel Rivals or watching Snap streams.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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