Slack begins suspending accounts in Russia

Several organizations in Russia have found themselves locked out of their Slack accounts without notice, according to Axios. The Salesforce-owned business messaging app has started cutting off Russian users from its platform to comply with international sanctions against the country, as well as with the policies its parent company implemented following the invasion of Ukraine. Axios said it was mostly organizations directly affected by the sanctions that were locked out and that the terms of the restrictions against them require an immediate cutoff.

Since Slack serves as companies’ main internal form of communication and can also be used to share files within organizations, it typically hosts a lot of important data for its customers. The organizations that suddenly lost access to their accounts may have also lost the chance to download their data, unless they’d prepared for the possibility of getting locked out. 

Salesforce published a statement earlier this month that it’s exiting business in Russia, after all. The company said that it has a very small number of customers in the country and that it had already started exiting those relationships the week before. In a statement, Slack told Axios:

“Slack is required to take action to comply with sanctions regulations in the U.S. and other countries where we operate, including in some circumstances suspending accounts without prior notice, as mandated by law. We are in contact with affected customers regarding the impact of these actions on their account status, where permitted by law.”

While Slack isn’t deleting data owned by the Russian customers it suspended, the sanctioned organizations also won’t have access to their data until the sanctions affecting them are lifted.