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The US Commerce department now has 45 days to interpret and enforce the rules, giving Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, further power over the global tech industry.
"These orders are extremely broadly drawn and will mean that the regulatory agencies in charge of enforcing them will have to put a lot of meat on some very bare bones," said Eric Crusius, a partner at the US law firm Holland and Knight.
A strict interpretation could force Apple and Google to remove WeChat and its Chinese sister app Weixin from their app stores, a move that would severely dent iPhone sales in China, such is the popularity of the app.
The US could also cut Tencent off from the computer chips, servers and US software that it relies upon to operate, lawyers warned. US companies such as Walmart, Coke and Nike that rely on WeChat to market and sell their goods would also be hit. WeChat has largely replaced email in China and is one of two main ways of making mobile payments in China's increasingly cashless cities.
One thing it cannot do is ban people from using WeChat; under the law which Mr Trump is invoking, the administration cannot block any personal communications which do not involve financial transactions. Clif Burns, a lawyer at the Washington DC firm Crowell and Moring, said that if WeChat or any other company wanted to appeal in court, that limitation to the law might give it cause to do so.
The executive order appeared to have been drafted hastily: the company it names as a target for the ban, Tencent Holdings Ltd, Shenzhen, China does not exist. Tencent Holdings is the name of the Hong Kong listed parent, while Tencent Technology is the Shenzhen-based company. Some lawyers disputed whether the ban would hit only WeChat, or all of Tencent's businesses in the US.
"It's a cliffhanger," said Nicolas Turner, a Hong Kong-based lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson, a law firm.
"It could mean that US companies will be restricted from transferring technology to Tencent or manufacturers or carriers from hosting or supporting the WeChat app. Individual users could be prevented from downloading it. It's not clear yet how it will be applied."
At the lighter end of possible restrictions on Tencent is the possibility that the Commerce Department regulations will solely target WeChat's international business.
Some analysts said it was possible US companies and individuals would not be barred from working with the application in China. "We believe WeChat (overseas) may be impacted, but Weixin in China should not be impacted," Bernstein said in a note, referring to the application by its Chinese name.
Mr Crusius warned however that the language in the order remained sufficiently vague that the Commerce department could target Weixin as well should it choose to do so.
Tencent has made a push to expand the use of WeChat to foreign users, partnering with Visa, Mastercard and American Express to allow payments by non-Chinese credit cards on its payments system WeChat Pay.
In November 2019, WeChat partnered with Symphony, a US-based chat app focused on the financial industry, to allow users to connect across the two platforms.
Even so, WeChat users in the US only amount to about 3 million monthly active users, mostly the Chinese diaspora and Chinese students studying at US universities, for whom the app is a valuable way to keep in touch with their families and friends back home.
A much larger concern for the company than restrictions on its overseas WeChat business is being barred from buying US servers or chips for use in its WeChat business.
"Tencent is a major buyer of US technologies and services. Even a narrow reading of the executive order might deprive Tencent from some of the US technologies it depends on," said Dan Wang, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a Beijing-based research firm. Tencent's WeChat is hosted on servers that, like all computers around the world, often use components from US companies such as Intel.
The move against Tencent stopped short of a previous executive order against Huawei that applied sanctions barring it from using the US financial system. But the distinction may make little practical difference to Tencent if the US government is intent of depriving the company of US technologies.
"It could be the case that this executive order makes Tencent's situation effectively similar to Huawei's," Mr Wang said. "Both companies might require a licence from Commerce for the US technologies they had been depending on, with uncertain prospects for approval."
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It was also unclear whether the executive order would hit Tencent's main engine of growth, online gaming, which help overall sales rise 26 per cent in the first quarter year-on-year to Rmb108.1bn ($15.2bn).
Tencent was the only Chinese company to feature in the world's ten largest providers of both apps and games by download volumes last year, according to App Annie, which tracks mobile platforms.
It has also amassed stakes in a number of US companies, including Riot Games, best known for League of Legends, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty, Roblox, Reddit, Tesla, Lyft, Warner Music and Snap.
