I have really bad news for Adobe customers in Venezuela…

California-based software company Adobe on Monday announced to
soon ban accounts and cancel the subscriptions for all of its
customers in Venezuela in order to comply with economic sanctions
that the United States imposed on the Latin American country.

The Trump administration issued an executive order on 5th August
2019, targeting the President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro for
allegedly usurping the presidency and violating the human rights of
the country’s citizens.

The Presidential Executive Order
13884 has been designed to block American companies and
individuals from conducting virtually all trade with Venezuela.
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As a result, Adobe has now decided to deactivate all accounts in
the country, leaving thousands of users and companies without
access to the company’s graphics and multimedia software, including
Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader, Adobe After Effects,
Lightroom, and Flash Player.

The sanctions order seems to hit ordinary people rather than the
government of Nicolás Maduro.

As described by Michelle Bachelet, United Nations’ high
commissioner for human rights, “the sanctions are extremely broad
and fail to contain sufficient measures to mitigate their impact on
the most vulnerable sectors of the population.”

Adobe Can’t Refund Subscription Money to Venezuela Users

The bad news doesn’t end here.

A copy of an email Adobe sent to its Venezuela users | Shared on Twitter[3]

Adobe is also refusing to issue any refunds to its Venezuelan
customers for any purchases or outstanding subscriptions, since the
presidential order also barred any transactions with the entities,
“including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits,
etc.”

This also means that access to free Adobe products is also being
pulled off, and no new Venezuelan user can sign up for any of the
company’s services.

Venezuelan users will have until October 28—that’s exactly 20 days
from now—to download the data they saved over their Adobe accounts
before the company deactivates them.

Since the executive order has been issued with no expiration
date, Adobe says that the “decision to rescind it rests solely with
the U.S. Government,” and that the company will monitor any
developments closely and make “every effort to restore services to
Venezuela as soon as it is legally permissible to do so.”

It’s currently unclear if other U.S. technology companies, like
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have already or are
planning to impose similar bans of their services for customers in
Venezuela.