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...
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.
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.