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Slack Technologies Inc. has started banning accounts with links to Iran and other nations, according to reports Thursday.

Some of the reports said users with hardly any remaining ties to Iran, living as far and wide as Finland and Canada, as well as the United States, had woken up to see their Slack accounts deactivated.

The BBC reported that accounts had also been closed because the owners had at one point either visited Iran or North Korea. One user said she had been banned for “legally visiting” Cuba many years ago. Another of Slack’s 8 million users, a Ph.D. student in Canada, said he had lost his account because he’s “ethnically associated with Iran.”

People whose accounts had been deactivated did receive a message from Slack explaining what had happened, although there seemed to be no channel for recourse.

“In order to comply with export control and economic sanctions laws and regulations promulgated by the U.S. Department of Commerce and U.S. Department of Treasury, Slack prohibits unauthorized use of its products and services in certain sanctioned countries,” said the notice. “We’ve identified your team/account as originating from one of these countries and are closing the account effective immediately.”

Although the now-hashtagged #SlackBan might seem pretty harsh for some, the company said in a statement to various media that anyone who had visited Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Syria or the Crimea region, might have been culled or will be culled.

“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,” Slack said in a statement to Mashable. “If our systems indicate a workspace primary owner has an IP address originating from a designated embargoed country, the entire workspace will be deactivated.”

It seems that merely having logged into Slack while visiting one of the aforementioned countries was enough. “I’m from Belgium. I traveled to Iran a few years back in time,” said one of the deactivated users.

One company said it was currently experiencing some amount of turmoil as its chief technology officer had been banned for visiting Crimea on holiday. “His account is banned now, the workspace has no administrator,” a colleague tweeted. “This results in us being unable to perform the vital functions and use important integrations that are an integral part of our process!”

Update: On Friday, Slack issued “An apology and an Update.” In it, Slack said that “we discovered that we made a series of mistakes and inadvertently deactivated a number of accounts that we shouldn’t have.” It added that “we did not block any user based on their nationality or ethnicity.”

The company said it has restored access to most of the mistakenly blocked accounts and is “working hard to restore any remaining users whose access was blocked in error.”

However, it did say that some accounts still will be blocked:

“We will soon begin blocking access to our service from IP addresses associated with an embargoed country. Users who travel to a sanctioned country may not be able to access Slack while they remain in that country. However, we will not deactivate their account and they will be able to access Slack when they return to countries or regions for which no blocking is required.”

Photo: Rob Brewer/Flickr