This doesn’t really mean much by itself. These are elements of the BP apology for the gulf spill as well. The only thing that matters is actions taken. Anything else is fluff part of standard PR.

That specifically doesn't admit the mistake or take responsibility.

You can find further discussion of their apologies here, and they get a 3/10 rating for apologizing well: https://www.perfectapology.com/BP-oil-spill-apology.html

It's okay to mess up if you quickly correct the issue or at least quickly recognize it and try to correct it. The problems arise when incidents are buried or ignored. Late apologies are not apologies at all.

Slack is only apologizing due to the public uproar, as apparently many people were affected.

Our cofounder was also locked of his account. He's Irish and living in Romania, with nothing to do with the embargoed countries.

To make matters worse, he tried contacting support to prove his nationality and country of residence and 2 days later he's still locked out of Slack.

In absolute terms yes. Compared to how for example google handles this it’s outstanding.

Regarding user support, Google ranks on par with an anvil.

Anvils do break, sometimes, and the failure mode is catastrophic: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=broken+anvil&t=h_&iax=images&ia=im...

I also had Google accuse me of "click fraud" on a website I ran in college- they stole about $300 from me, with no ability to appeal.

Google's support- even for paying customers- is abysmal.

We had someone locked out of their email while using Google's paid company mail service (App engine, I think it was called). Several days with no mail and no useful support taught me that relying on Google can leave you with no recourse.

> We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users.

No nationality? Don't they kind of have to collect nationality in order to comply with the law on implementing sanctions?

They should have communicated with their users to begin with before taking such harsh actions.

I'd say no.

Your thesis needs work IMO.

Make sure you don't fail morally by ever presenting an incomplete/unsound thesis again!

(Serious question)

What about responding to that honest emotional expression directly? "Ouch. I hadn't realize how much I'd hurt you. Truly, I'm sorry."

By that argument regret seems impossible. Some nuance is probably lost here, to be fair.

In each case though you did it to begin with because

1) while you knew you would be sorry, you surmised you would be more sorry not doing it, or

2) did not believe anyone would mind your actions, or

3) did not realize you would so much regret it when others took offense to your actions.

#3 absolves you of nothing. #2 absolves you unless you thought they wouldn't mind simply because they wouldn't know. #1 could absolves you in theory, but might just reflect priorities that the recipient of your apology doesn't share.

All this is likely of little use to anyone, but I couldn't resist writing it down anyway.

We (humans) are not always good at predicting the future or other people’s reactions. We do stupid things and make stupid mistakes all the time and when these things affect others we often feel sorry that we did those things.

If you are really sincere with your apology, and you are doing the best you can to fix what you did, so just ignore this kind of statement. You are doing your part.

I've spent the day messaging and talking with friends who work within Slack in an engineering capacity who feel, frankly, betrayed by the organization. Slack advertises itself internally as an engineering-driven company and on the security side, has an incredibly elaborate system of internal controls that I have espoused emulations of during my consulting that, and I am being very specific without being too specific here, were bypassed to perform these account bans. Slack's security team was bypassed. Slack's internal controls were contravened. Slack has demonstrated that they can access every location you've ever logged in from and will cheerfully give that information up for the pleasure of the US Government without it even being required of them.

They're required by law not to do business in certain countries. They were over-broad and over-aggressive in how they tried to follow that law, unnecessarily shutting down accounts, which was certainly a fuckup. But I don't see any indication that they gave information to the US government.

Some of us use Slack because we have work to do.

How noble in reason! Some of us were banned without justification from our jobs today via the unjustified unilateral action of a private company. In fact, my job is to help companies secure their internal communications. So, talking with people about this was my job. What was yours?

Okay, so how did you block them?

>As is standard in the enterprise software industry, Slack uses location information principally derived from IP addresses to implement these required blocks.

So, you blocked users based on their nationality.

>We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users.

you clearly possess enough information about the nationality of your users to block them based on it, which was your intent. You backpedaled when people who were not the target nationality began to complain.

Where you are currently located or resident is effectively unrelated to your nationality (unless you were born a citizen of your country and have never left it, not even for a vacation).

This comment by Slack was in response to several (fairly overblown) comments that they were racially targeting users ("Slack bans Iranian in Canada"), when in fact they were disabling accounts of people who have used Slack from an embargoed country at some point. To be clear, this is still bad, just not "blocking users based on their nationality". All of the outrage was over expats (or travellers) being blocked.

It's Slack, so actually 2/10.