Earlier, Donald Trump instructed, by September 15, to develop a plan to change the owner of TikTok, which would ensure the protection of the data of American users that are stored on the servers of the popular short video service. If this requirement of the President of the United States is not met, then TikTok will be officially banned in the country.

According to reports, Microsoft is in talks with the government, hoping to get the necessary time to implement the technical part of the deal. The source notes that Microsoft wants assurances that it will be given the time it needs before the company agrees to a deal with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. People familiar with this issue say that solving technical issues will take a year or even longer.

This is due to the fact that TikTok functionally and technically duplicates the service Douyin, which is also owned by ByteDance and is aimed at users from China. The point is that both services share technical resources. First of all, this concerns the server part, which ensures the operation of basic functions, as well as data storage, content moderation, user profile management, etc.

Another difficulty lies in the mechanism of the content selection algorithm. It is used in the For You section and is used to recommend videos to users based on their behavior. TikTok is supposed to use a content recommendation algorithm that is independent of Douyin. However, the algorithm processes huge amounts of user data that comes from different regions. As Microsoft plans to take over the portion of TikTok that includes users in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, there will be significant technical difficulties in separating user data.

Cybersecurity expert Ryan Speers of River Loop Security believes that Microsoft will likely need to rely on ByteDance’s code to keep the popular service running smoothly while it transitions to internal infrastructure.