EA temporarily blocks access to Origin in a cohort of U.S trade embargoed countries

Major game publisher, EA, seems to have blocked several countries from using it’s EA access service all of a sudden. The issue was brought to light when one Reddit user from a South Asian country, Myanmar, tried to access his purchased games through EA access and wasn’t able to out of the blue one day.

Trivial_sublime stated in his post:

I was trying to log into Origin a few days ago and got a bizarre ‘Access Denied’ message, I googled it and found that ‘Origin is no longer available in Myanmar.

An official representative of Origin acknowledged the apparent outage in the thread, mentioned that EA is “internally reviewing the situation and looking into whether and when service can be restored.”

EA_Alex’s comment follows and explains the reasoning behind this denial to access. He states,

Hey all,

The short answer here is that this occurred due to the US government trade embargo on Myanmar. In accordance with US law, EA is legally required to restrict online services to residents of countries that are embargoed. This isn’t an EA-specific issue — it’s an issue that impacts all companies offering services that are covered by trade embargoes. As the OP has noted, the embargo on Myanmar appear to have been lifted earlier this month.

Accordingly, EA is internally reviewing the situation and looking into whether and when service can be restored to Myanmar residents.It’s unclear to me whether we can do anything for residents of other countries that are still similarly embargoed, but I’ll bring the topic up for discussion internally. 

And not too much later an Iranian player on Reddit reported that he also stated his experience of getting his account revoked. And soon after, an EA manager made a post in response to a support thread which read,

In compliance with US embargoes and sanctions laws, Origin is not available in Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine (Crimea region).

Here’s to wishing no gamer(and no one in general) has to face the consequences of friction between countries.

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