【Deborah Sullavan Archives】

If you’ve ever visited Iran,Deborah Sullavan Archives Cuba, North Korea, Syria, or the Crimea region, you should probably check if your Slack account is still active.

Early Thursday morning, Slack users began reporting the real-time messaging app had sent a message notifying them that they had been banned from the service. The reasoning given to these banned users: U.S. economic sanction laws and regulations.

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“Slack complies with the U.S. regulations related to embargoed countries and regions. As such, we prohibit unauthorized Slack use in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea region of Ukraine,” Slack said in a statement provided 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. If someone thinks any actions we took were done in error, we will review further.”

In correspondences with some of these now-banned Slack users, Mashable discovered that it looks as if logging into those sanctioned countries at any point in time would have been enough to get caught up in Slack’s purge and banned from the service.

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“Slack closed my account today! I’m a PhD student in Canada with no teammates from Iran!” tweeted Amir aka @a_h_a on Twitter.

Another Twitter user, Antoine Dejonckheere, responded to Amir’s tweet.

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“Same issue for me. I'm from Belgium. I travelled to Iran a few years back,” replied Dejonckheere.

“Last time I visited Iran was more than 6 months ago for a couple of weeks,” Amir told Mashable.

Dejonckheere’s last time visiting Iran was even further in the past.

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“I've been to Iran for professional reasons, 4 years ago,” he told us in an email. “Those were 6 trips over a span of approximately 7 months.”

Users who may have logged into Slack while visiting Iran weren’t the only ones reporting the issue.

“My wife’s Slack account was closed yesterday,” wrote a user on Hacker News. “She created the account while traveling in Cuba (legally) years ago and hasn’t been back to Cuba or any other sanctioned country since.”

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“We have the same problem. They blocked our CTO's account, after his vacation in Crimea,” tweeted @Sitecraft_co to another Twitter user reporting the issue.

“Our CTO visits the Crimea every year. He was there June - July, 2018 last time. Purpose: travel and tourism. The CTO is officially registered as a resident of the city Kharkiv, East of Ukraine which has nothing to do with the Crimea,” Alex of the web development firm Sitecraft told Mashable via email. “Goes without saying, he did use Slack during his trip as a workspace administrator because this is his job. Because his account is banned now, the workspace has no administrator. This results in us being unable to perform the vital functions and use important integrations that are an integral part of our process!”

While Alex also pointed out that his company has paid for to Slack’s service for two years, it should be noted that the bans have affected both paid subscribers and free users.

The National Iranian American Council, a nonprofit organization that represents the Iranian-American community has sent a letter to Slack seeking additional information on the accounts closures.

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“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),” reads the NIAC letter.

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“Detecting an Iranian IP address on a paid account (which is presumed to be for business) login as a violation of sanctions is a wrong interpretation of these regulations” tweeted Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at Oxford focusing on online information access in Iran.

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Nevertheless, being caught up in this whole ordeal has left some Slack users a bit uneasy.

“I personally hope a connection log in Slack's backend highlighting an Iranian IP has resulted in the account closure,” said Amir. “I don't have any financial or professional ties to Iran.”

A Slack spokesperson followed up with additional information:

“Slack complies with the U.S. regulations related to embargoed countries and regions, as does every U.S.-based company. We updated our system for applying geolocation information, which relies on IP addresses, and that led to the deactivations for accounts tied to embargoed countries. We only utilize IP addresses to take these actions. We do not possess information about nationality or the ethnicity of our users. If users think we’ve made a mistake in blocking their access, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll review as soon as possible.”

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