Slack ban accounts from Crimea

    Last night one of our employees, "suddenly and without a declaration of war" received the following message from the corporate Slack'a about the US sanctions "to certain countries and regions, such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Ukraine's Crimea region":



    a particularly nasty sounded completion: "closing the account effective immediately."

    In fact, “immediately” turned out to be slightly more extensible than one might expect: a colleague was able to sit in Slack for a little more than an hour. After this, the life of his account came to an end:



    I repeat that this happened only yesterday, and since we have other representatives from this region, it is known for certain that not everyone has been affected by the changes. Moreover, the Internet reports that in fact "persecution" began much earlier:



    What happened to the user technically? The employee's account was deactivated (“Billing status: Deactivated”), that is, “sent to the archive” in Slack: it is no longer in the usual channels, the user does not pop up in the auto-completion when trying to make a mention, and searching for users for direct messages It turns out at the very end (when you click there, the history of private messages opens without the ability to send new ones).

    If usual such accounts can be restored (Administration → Manage members → unsuccessful user search → Show all members → user choice → Activate account), then in this case, of course, we are waiting for: A



    quick workaround is clear: a new account with VPN (yes, not very nice in terms of the absence of all former history, private channels and in general). More globally - look again at self-hosted solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat (which is even less fun in the sense of new upcoming worries ... but there were success stories, including among large companies ) .

    The moral here is not only in what the RMS constantly talks about , but also - given the suddenness of what happened - of the importance of having Plan B for such situations (for example, special Telegram chats).

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