Coco Gauff, an American tennis sensation, expressed her sadness over the disappearance of the TikTok app in the USA. After winning a match at the Australian Open and advancing to the quarterfinals, she wrote “RIP TikTok USA” on a TV camera lens along with a broken heart symbol.

Her victory against Belinda Bencic with a score of 5-7, 6-2, 6-1 took place in the main stadium of the Grand Slam tournament in Melbourne. Curiously, this match ended just an hour after TikTok vanished from major app stores in the United States.

It is common for tennis players to be given a pen after a victory to share their thoughts through the lens of a camera situated courtside during tournaments.

In this case, Gauff paused a bit to think and said, “I think I’m going to go with this one,” before offering her TikTok message in blue ink.

At the French Open in June 2022, after reaching her first Grand Slam final as a teenager, Gauff referred to a recent spate of mass shootings in the US at the time and wrote in marker: “Peace. End gun violence.”

Now 20, Gauff is one of the top players in her sport.

She won the 2023 U.S. Open and is currently ranked No. 3.

Gauff frequently has posted on TikTok, often mimicking popular trends.

“I feel this is the third or fourth time this has happened. This time it’s just like, ‘Whatever.’ If I wake up and it doesn’t work, fine. I’m done wasting my time figuring it out,” Gauff said earlier during the Australian Open. “I see there’s a new app called RedNote that a lot of people are migrating over to. So I feel, regardless, people are going to be fine because people are always going to migrate to another app.”

She added that she hoped TikTok would survive, calling it “a great thing for a lot of small businesses in our country, and a lot of creators make money on it and have the chance to spread stories. Personally, me, a lot of great stories I’ve heard are from TikTok and connecting with people has been (through) TikTok. I hope it will stay, (but) obviously I don’t know all the security issues and things like that.”

A US federal law that would have banned the popular social media platform was scheduled to go into effect.

Apple and Google app stores are prohibited from offering TikTok under a law that required its China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or face a ban in the US.

When users opened the TikTok app, they encountered a pop-up message from the company that prevented them from scrolling on videos.

“I heard about that,” No. 1-ranked Aryna Sabalenka, a Belarusian who is the two-time defending champion in Melbourne, said after her victory Sunday.

“This is not something we can control, and I hope they’re going to figure it out, because I love TikTok.”