A US judge early yesterday blocked the Commerce Department from requiring Apple and Alphabet's Google to remove Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat for downloads by afterwards the same day.
US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco said in an order that WeChat users who filed a lawsuit "have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim, the balance of hardships tips in the plaintiffs' favour".
On Friday, the Commerce Department had issued an order, citing national security grounds, prohibiting US app stores from offering Tencent Holdings' WeChat for download starting late yesterday US time.
Judge Beeler's preliminary injunction also blocked the Commerce Department order that would have barred other transactions with WeChat in the US that could have degraded the site's usability for current US users. The Commerce Department did not immediately comment.
WeChat has had an average of 19 million daily active users in the US, analytics firm Apptopia said early the previous month. It's popular among Chinese students, Americans living in China and some Americans who have personal or business relationships in China.
The Justice Department said blocking the order would "frustrate and displace (President Donald Trump's) determination of how best to address threats to national security".
But Judge Beeler said that "while the general evidence concerning the threat to national security related to China (regarding technology and mobile technology) is considerable, the specific evidence about WeChat is modest".
The WeChat Users Alliance that had sued praised the ruling "as an important and hard-fought victory" for "millions of WeChat users in the US".
REUTERS