Slack apologizes for, reinstates accounts it banned for U.S. sanctions

The banned Slack accounts are coming back.

On Friday evening, Slack issued a mea culpa for what some were calling “discriminatory” account bans, made in an effort to comply with U.S. economic sanctions.

“We acknowledge that we made several mistakes here,” Slack wrote in a blog post. “Our attempts to comply with these regulations were not well-implemented. In our communications, we did not treat our customers and other users with the respect they deserve.”

Earlier in the week, some users reported that Slack had unceremoniously shut down their accounts with little to no communication. Because these users had traveled to countries under U.S. trade embargoes — including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine — they could no longer use Slack.

Slack made the change in an effort to comply with U.S. trade sanctions. The company based the account closures on the accounts’ associations with IP addresses originating in embargoed countries.

“Slack complies with the U.S. regulations related to embargoed countries and regions,” Slack previously wrote to Mashable. “Our systems may have detected an account and/or a workspace owner on our platform with an IP address originating from a designated embargoed country. If our systems indicate a workspace primary owner has an IP address originating from a designated embargoed country, the entire workspace will be deactivated.”

Slack’s change, however, was apparently over-zealous. Users who had been to embargoed countries no more than one time were hit with account closures. There was widespread Twitter outrage, and some wondered whether the discrimination was based on ethnicity, not just IP address. 

“We are deeply concerned that Slack may be engaged in discrimination against persons of Iranian descent, as U.S. companies — such as Slack — are generally not prohibited from providing services to Iranian persons who are resident outside of Iran under U.S. sanctions laws administered by the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC),” the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) wrote in a letter to Slack.

Now, Slack has walked back its actions in a blog post entitled ‘An Apology and an Update.’ It acknowledges that the update negatively affected people it shouldn’t have. And even that some of the people it intended to bar from use at the time were unfairly treated. 

“We made a series of mistakes and inadvertently deactivated a number of accounts that we shouldn’t have,” the post reads. “We also apologize to the people whose accounts we intended to disable in order to comply with these regulations. We did not handle the communication well and in both cases we failed to live up to our own standards for courtesy and customer-centricity.”

Some of the banned accounts that received public attention appear to have been reinstated.

Slack says it has changed course for complying with economic embargoes. Now, if a person travels to a sanctioned country, they won’t be able to access their Slack account within that country. But the account will remain active, and a mere association with the country won’t have any impact on an account’s status.

Despite the apology and change of course, some are saying it’s too little, too late. The NIAC wrote in a Twitter thread that Slack needs to do better — but so does the U.S. government in its sanctions policy.

The Trump administration pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal in May. The administration then re-issued the sanctions on Iran that had been lifted during the Obama administration as part of the Nuclear agreement. 

The NIAC says that the Slack account ban incident illustrates the “spillover effects” of what it calls “a web of sanctions that are neither narrowly crafted nor clear in their targets.”

For now, the Slack affair may have come to a close on the technical side. But the discrimination some users felt will live on.