- Walmart included a massive, nonsensical typo in its news release about the TikTok deal over the weekend.
- When discussing Oracle’s role as TikTok’s new cloud provider, the company included this sentence: “This unique technology eliminates the risk of foreign governments spying on American users or trying to influence them with disinformation.ekejechb ecehggedkrrnikldebgtkjkddhfdenbhbkuk.”
- Walmart and Oracle received tentative approval from President Donald Trump to acquire 20% of TikTok Global, the newly formed company that will host TikTok for users in the US and abroad.
- But Walmart’s typo — which has since been corrected — is a sign of how wild the saga of TikTok’s sale has become over the past two months, with multiple bidders and conflicting information.
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It’s been a hectic few weeks for anyone paying close attention to TikTok and its plans to sell its US operations — and the stress appears to have even gotten the best of Walmart.
The retail giant on Saturday published a press release announcing that, along with Oracle, it had received tentative approval to acquire 20% of TikTok Global, the newly formed company that will host TikTok for users in the US and abroad. But in the middle of its statement on the deal, Walmart included a massive, nonsensical typo.
“Based on decades of experience securing the world’s most sensitive data, Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud fully isolates running applications and responds to security threats autonomously,” the statement reads. “This unique technology eliminates the risk of foreign governments spying on American users or trying to influence them with disinformation.ekejechb ecehggedkrrnikldebgtkjkddhfdenbhbkuk.”
Walmart has since republished the statement, sans typo.
The battle over TikTok’s ownership began earlier this year, when President Donald Trump said he was considering banning the wildly popular short-form video app, owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, over national security concerns. Rather than outright banning the app, however, the Trump administration invited ByteDance to find an American company to take the reins of TikTok’s US operations.
While other names were initially floated, in August, Microsoft emerged as the likely buyer, proposing a multibillion-dollar deal for TikTok's US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand operations. Walmart confirmed that it was working with Microsoft in its bid to acquire the company.
But by mid-September, ByteDance rejected Microsoft's bid and Oracle emerged as TikTok's US "technology provider." Walmart stayed in the running, continuing to discuss an investment, even as the Oracle deal went ahead. Now, it's one of several US companies investing in TikTok, though Walmart says it will also provide retail capabilities like ecommerce, fulfillment, and payments to TikTok Global.
Even now, the deal is still in danger of being blocked by both Trump and Chinese officials. It seems that despite the back and forth over a tumultuous two months, there may still be more developments to come.