[oxfordmale]

OFAC(Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions are clear-cut and they can issue very large fines for non-compliance. These sanctions have been in place for a while now. It sounds like someone flagged this to their legal department, who then advised to go nuclear, given the threat of large fines.

[jacquesm]

You can go to jail for this, it doesn't just stop at fines.

[sam_lowry_]

Hetzner is a EU business which only recently started the US expansion.

I am pretty sure Martin Hetzner lives in Germany.

This makes the jail option very unlikely.

[jacquesm]

As I linked elsewhere in this thread: German business people have already gone to jail over breaking sanctions, it is mostly up to interpretation of the (German) authorities whether or not what Hetzner does qualifies as breaking the sanctions. If I were an exec in this position I'd play it very, very safe.

[byyll]

OFAC seems like a US thing, correct me if I am wrong.

[oxfordmale]

Yes, you are right, but they also serve the US market.

LOCATION. We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany) and in Helsinki (Finland). In Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon (USA), we also provide AMD-based cloud servers and cloud features.