My Google Workspace account suspension

https://zencapital.substack.com/p/sad-story-of-my-google-workspace

by zenincognito • 4 months ago

369 223 4 months ago

zencapital.substack.com

pluc• 4 months ago

Time since paying Google customers had to resort to social media outrage to obtain decent resolution: 0 days

Good luck to you

Klaster_1• 4 months ago

This should be illegal. Megacorps eat more and more of our life and regular people are increasingly at mercy of these hostile entities. They should be pushed more against. If we can't have proper anti monopoly splits like AT&T, then at least ways to prevent them exerting too much power are long due. If you provide an essential service, responsibility should match that.

loloquwowndueo• 4 months ago

Excreting power. What an awesome mental image.

“Exerting” would be more correct I guess but less fun.

neom2• 4 months ago

Funny because I have dyslexia and read excreting power as exerting power, and then had to read your "Exerting" underneath 4 times to understand the mistake. I guess it's the phonics, dyslexia is so weird tho, ha.

amelius3• 4 months ago

Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.

dotandgtfo• 4 months ago

This is one of the goals of the digital services act.

jjav2• 4 months ago

There needs to be a law that every cloud-based service which has accounts for more than (say) 1% of population, must have a physical service counter presence in every major town staffed by an employee who must be empowered to resolve all account access issues.

Notice how phone carries manage to have a shop in every little strip mall, you're never more than a few miles from the nearest one. Google takes in far more revenue, can easily afford the same. Or they could even just partner with the phone carriers and have a staffed desk in every tmobile/at&t/verizon shop.

cube002• 4 months ago

Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket.

No company will give full account unlock control to field employees.

Even the bank teller behind the glass needs to phone their internal fraud dept to unlock accounts.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

"Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions and continue to hold my email hostage."

Well, you have become the product here. That also happens by other "free" email providers too. I had this happen to me on inbox.lt; the guy demanded I use a smartphone to "prove" my identity. At that point I realised they want to connect this data to the account and sell it to others who are interested in that.

dagss• 4 months ago

Google Workspace isn't free, it is a paid for plan.

zenincognito3• 4 months ago

its $13 per month for a basic plan.

izacus• 4 months ago

What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you shitty to the victim?

techteach00• 4 months ago

Because his honest and accurate diagnosis for why mega tech corps treat people inhumanely is the first step towards stopping it. In my opinion of course.

pbowyer• 4 months ago

Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/, a DIY and self-build forum. For 10 years it ranked very well on Google, particularly in the UK, and then on 28 December 2025 it disappeared from Google's index.

Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong. I'm a paying Workspace customer and it's made me think I need a backup plan in case I'm ever suspended. Reports like this don't encourage.

ValentineC4• 4 months ago

Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong.

The own-brand forum (Google, Microsoft, Apple) seem to be infested by netizens from lower-income countries trying to build online customer support portfolios by providing utterly useless answers.

That, or trying to game the system and getting shortlisted for a free trip to Google HQ for one of their contributor summits.

mjlee2• 4 months ago

I am genuinely curious if anybody knows of a non-trivial problem being solved on one of these forums, at least for a huge company that’s palming off customer support. It just feels like screaming in to the void, only for someone to (deliberately?) misinterpret your question and give you some generic advice.

samlinnfer2• 4 months ago

I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft (Office365) here but it actually has a track record of actually having support, support people that you can talk on the phone with and knows how to navigate the dark corners of their convoluted systems and actually solved my problems (even if it was caused by Microsoft's horrific UI in the first place).

masfuerte• 4 months ago

An article here a couple of days ago said that the automation behind the scenes in Azure is piss poor and the whole thing is held together by thousands of contractors manually fixing the endless failures.

On the plus side, it does mean they have thousands of people who know how to fix problems.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

faidit• 4 months ago

At Google there is one guy who knows how to fix the problem.. he's a monk who is also in 700 different teams and the only one who remembers how the systems were built. You have to climb all the way up to his mountain abode, hope that he is home and pray that he will hear your cries and help you

skeeter20202• 4 months ago

Any painful automation story feels very different from their customer service. MS has always been superior to their competition with customer service - especially paid service contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late (and reluctantly) to them.

pzmarzly• 4 months ago

I guess one way to protect yourself from this would be to use another IAM solution for SSO login to Google Workspace, but is there any reasonable choice for small businesses other than Entra ID or Okta?

gchamonlive2• 4 months ago

There's always keycloak you can rollout yourself. It's not trivial but it's quite doable.

walterbell2• 4 months ago

Thanks for the pointer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354

edit: looks like there are affordable managed hosting providers for keycloak.

watusername• 4 months ago

Instead of Keycloak, I would recommend giving Kanidm a try: It's much more lightweight and covers most of what you usually need (one notable exception being SAML).

https://github.com/kanidm/kanidm

protimewaster2• 4 months ago

I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot of ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil big tech players.

I gotta say, though, that my experience with trying to get them to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend any money with them.

I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

My friend, who bought a Pixel around the same time, also wasn't able to get the year of Gemini they were promised.

That same friend has a Google One subscription, billed through their phone carrier. Recently, Google (or the provider?) discontinued that specific Google One plan, as well as the option to bill via your carrier. This was all covered in an email sent to my friend. As consolation, the email explained, my friend was given the option to switch to a different plan, billed monthly by Google (instead of their phone carrier), with 6 months free. Except, the new plan, and the 6 months free, wasn't selectable as a plan type for their account. So my friend emails Google about it and, to my complete lack of surprise, Google was unwilling/unable to provide any resolution.

At this point, I legitimately don't understand why, unless I had no other option, I would pick Google for services. They clearly put no real effort into resolving any service issues for any customer that's not spending millions with them.

HumanOstrich2• 4 months ago

I agree with your sentiment, but I wanted to call out that they've always been just as evil as other big tech companies.

I think their motto of "don't be evil" was some pretty clever PR.

I started questioning it c. 2008 when they ghosted me on resolving an issue with my blogspot site that was a bug in the platform. All I could get was a condescending non-response from a "diamond" volunteer on a forum. They were apparently the gatekeepers to reaching actual support.

mhitza• 4 months ago

They weren't always evil, not in my opinion.

Back in the day they bought Feedburner, and merged it with their internal equivalent. In that process, my subscriber list was affected. They apologized and even sent out some swag. That was nice, for a small inconvenience at the time.

Today? humans don't even seem to be involved.

protimewaster2• 4 months ago

I definitely don't think they've ever been super nice, but I still they still have a few much more user-friendly approaches than others. E.g., one of the reasons I bought a Pixel is that Google is one of the only phone makers that manages to have respectable security practices and still respects users enough support them choosing to modify the software on their devices and run alternate operating systems.

dismalaf2• 4 months ago

Disagree. Even with their issues, they're still less evil than MS, Apple and especially Oracle or Meta.

If they didn't have all their issues (discontinuing products, bad customer service) they'd probably be bigger than MS and Apple combined. But here we are.

Also for better or worse, I pay for bundled Google storage + Gemini and YouTube separately, it's still worth it, even without free months or whatever. And still better than being in MS or Apple's ecosystem.

roelschroeven• 4 months ago

I think their "Don't be evil" was pretty close to the truth, as much as it can be for large corporations, until around the time Google purchased DoubleClick. That was in 2008, so that seems to match your experience.

lokar2• 4 months ago

Well, the actual phrase came from an engineer.

John23832• 4 months ago

Sounds a lot like Cloudflare at the moment.

subscribed3• 4 months ago

Same. Purchased Pixel 9 Pro XL, didn't get my year of Gemini or Google One, technical missuport couldn't be bothered circling between all the investigation steps I did and re-did already and tej "fixes" that have been verified ate not fixing anything.

"Support" agents couldn't be bothered - this feels like AI trapping me in the tarpit maze to save a few USD on the disk storage and infefence cost, effectively scamming me.

cyanydeez• 4 months ago

Sounds more like a question why there isn't a class action and deregulation push against them.

People really fail to unionize when they can just piss in the wind.

calvinmorrison3• 4 months ago

I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

Contract violation. The problem is it's simply too burdensome to go to small claims court.

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 4 months ago

If you do, it's also possible they ban your personal account

Evidlo• 4 months ago

Anyone have an idea whether it would be practical to go to small claims court? I'm curious if this is a path consumers can take if a corporation breaks an agreement?

profsummergig• 4 months ago

You'd have to go in the same jurisdiction as they're incorporated. I think (IANAL).

ajb• 4 months ago

Depends on your jurisdiction, of course. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, merely my impressions). In the UK this would likely be worth it if the injury is a specified financial amount. So for people who have paid for something and simply not got it, a small claims court is a good bet for getting a refund. A lot of the time however, the injury is in the consequences of relying on one of these companies services, and having it withdrawn without notice, as in the OP. Usually, you want service restored, as that is in fact the least costly action for both sides. But small claims courts (in the UK) do not make that kind of order. In theory you could sue for the financial consequences of the abrupt withdrawal, but I'd guess that's too complicated for a small claim.

TacticalCoder• 4 months ago

... my experience with trying to get them to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend any money with them.

When you pay for Google Workspace you are the client, not the customer and they do answer phone calls for support. The only two times my wife and I needed them for our SMEs, they picked up the phone and helped us resolve our issues. Super professional too. Haven't needed to give them a call in something like 8 years now.

Don't know about Pixel phone and Google One subscriptions but for SMEs Google Workspace is a godsend: it's incredibly cheap per employee and it's the way out of the Microsoft mediocrity. Everything only requires a browser, no matter the OS (wife works from Linux and now added a Mac Mini, for example): Windows can, at long last, get the middle finger in SMEs.

I'll forever be thankful to Google for allowing me to help many people get rid of Microsoft products, including Windows.

deanc• 4 months ago

It took me 13 years to get them to unban my adsense account. To this day I still have no idea what happened and have assumed it was a competitor sending fake clicks or something.

GeekyBear• 4 months ago

I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot of ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil big tech players.

It's been a decade since Google broke their promise not to use information gleaned from your use of their services to sell ads.

Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand — literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

https://psmag.com/news/googles-broken-privacy-promise/

nhuser22212• 4 months ago

Protonmail is the solution, or hosting your own email server but that one is more complex.

puppycodes2• 4 months ago

unfortunately hosting your own email server is nearly impossible if you want reliable delivery. If you don't care about being put in the spam box then it can work.

JimmyBiscuit• 4 months ago

They sold me a Pixel phone with a broken battery (I think 6a? Where the battery fails after 400 charging cycles). I got an email and the offer to just get 100$ in cash from them instead of sending my phone away to get it fixed. I never received the money after filling out all the forms. Fuck google.

rustyhancock• 4 months ago

My pixel 7 battery was dreadful, and despite it being promised to come with 3 months of YouTube premium and Music I didn't successfully redeem either.

I admit once it didn't work I didn't reach out to support but the entire experience was shit sandwich after shit sandwich.

greyb• 4 months ago

I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

I fixed this by deleting the subscription data for Google One (which also refunded me a prorated amount for my Google One plan), and then waiting a day.

bookofjoe5• 4 months ago

Once upon a time at Google: The year was 2013, and I'd been selected to be among the first 8,000 people to get Google Glass. I had to go to Google HQ in NYC from my home in Virginia to get it and be instructed 1:1 on how to use it. I was given a toll-free phone number to call for support by a Glass expert, available 24/7/365.

Not only did they answer immediately whenever I had even the smallest problem or question: I twice broke my Glass, and each time I'd call the support number to ask for a replacement.

Google's policy was that no matter how you broke it or how many times it happened, they'd replace it free. They'd immediately send a box to return the broken device (prepaid) and a couple days later a brand new Glass would arrive.

Like I said, once upon a time....

yomismoaqui• 4 months ago

The thing here is the 8.000 Glass early adopters vs the hundred-millions (billions maybe?) of Google workspace users.

It's not the same league, not even the same sport.

PS: Not defending Google here, their support for some products is abysmal

bookofjoe5• 4 months ago

You are correct. I agree 100%. It's easy to be great when it's on a tiny scale.

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

You were a volunteer employee. The very least they could do is make sure you can keep doing the job.

I think organizations have a very hard time staying motivated once the product’s concern has moved away from any one team. While you test the product for them there’s likely people whose jobs depended on you and 7999 others doing so. But eventually a product will be considered shipped and all the various talent now pays attention to what’s next.

bookofjoe5• 4 months ago

Well put.

ceejayoz• 4 months ago

Google's policy was that no matter how you broke it or how many times it happened, they'd replace it free.

Yes, because they were using you to figure out where it needed improvements for every day wear and tear. It wasn't charitable, it was R&D expense.

bookofjoe5• 4 months ago

True. I loved my Glass, it was amazing.

livinglist2• 4 months ago

Still remember the excitement I felt when I saw this Google Glass concept video in 2012: https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs?si=sVS7wzZ8jYH-oGMM

bookofjoe5• 4 months ago

How about this real-life Glass video I made in 2013 a month after I got mine; forty minutes long, recording the entirely of a 5K race!

https://youtu.be/Pu8HTrXI84g?si=puSZt5fYbR69yslo

assimpleaspossi• 4 months ago

I bought the Google 3-pod wifi system when it first came out. There was an 844 number for support on the back. I remember calling it when I didn't understand something and got an instant pickup by support staff.

With this comment in mind, I just now called that same number with an instant pickup telling me they no longer take support calls at that number.

themafia• 4 months ago

Yep, monopolistic loss leaders can feel great when they're showering you with expensive marketing, right up until they reliably pull the rug in an effort to screw everyone or recoup their losses.

ctippett• 4 months ago

It was only a few years ago that they offered all of their Stadia subscribers a full refund for every dollar they ever spent on the platform. By this point their reputation for customer service was well and truly known, but colour me surprised when I received a not insignificant sum credited to my bank account from Google.

I saw it mentioned in a comment elsewhere in this thread, but the level of service you get really seems dependant on which pocket of Google is responsible for the product you happen to be using. Unfortunately Workspace is a giant pocket with many billions of users with suboptimal and/or perpetually exhausted support.

fortran77• 4 months ago

At least he owns his own domain and can eventually switch over. A few years ago we decided to switch our personal emails from gmail accounts to domains we own (though the email is still handled by google.) This way if we ever lose our google account, we can switch the MX and be able to get all our recovery emails, bank second factors, password recoveries, etc.

l72• 4 months ago

They could switch their domain to another email provider and start getting emails, which is great. The problem though, is they also used their Google Account to log in to all the 3rd party services (payroll). I have no idea how you would get back into those services. Some _might_ let you switch off the Google Sign-in SSO, but I imagine that is a headache.

vednig• 4 months ago

Been there done that, none of it works, till this date my YouTube account is suspended and they can't do a thing about it.

Google Drive & Workspace are their most poorly designed products with the shittiest support ecosystem. Google would rather bleed money than work on it.

That's one of reason I started DoShare Personal Cloud[₁]

[1] https://getcloud.doshare.me

0xpgm• 4 months ago

Instead of getting more dependant on Big Tech's AI products, I think the perfect use for AI is develop tools and workflows that decouple one from Big Tech.

oybng• 4 months ago

This occurs to dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people on a daily basis. It happened to me many years ago. This is your opportunity to escape, instead you cry out here for attention. How pathetic

cj2• 4 months ago

Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account instead of IAM users.

In my experience Google Workspave support is very good. I’ve always been able to get a knowledgeable person on a call to debug issues without much difficulty.

But yea, if you’re locked out of your admin account, that’s another story. Very sjmilar to if you get locked out of your AWS root account. It’s a nightmare to recover.

ValentineC4• 4 months ago

Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account instead of IAM users.

It sounds like the mistake here is not appointing another Super Admin, and making sure they don't use their account for day to day needs. Or just having two Super Admin accounts controlled by the same person, heh.

I can't see how not using one's Super Admin account wouldn't prevent tripping some kind of fraud lockout that's impossible to recover from.

Randomly, I just remembered that I lost a GCP account because I tried logging in from Laos, and they asked me for the front and back photos of a payment card that I used ages ago that I didn't bother making scans of before it was lost. Urgh.

pfooti• 4 months ago

Make a primary super admin (admin@ whatever) and only log into it for admin purposes. Make an actual user (you@) for day to day line of business work. This has the benefit of making some categories of spear phishing and xsrf attacks harder if the account that gets compromised doesn't have root.

e402• 4 months ago

So you're saying for a simple setup of 1 user, you really need to pay for 2 users. The admin account and the real user you want to use, which doubles the cost.

cj2• 4 months ago

In an ideal world, 3 users, because you want a backup admin in case your primary admin is lost.

I don’t love it either, but these are Google’s published best practices / recommendations

r1ch• 4 months ago

I recently had to go through the recovery flow for an admin account and it was wild. Despite Google manually unlocking the account and giving me a reset link, every login was forced to authenticate via SMS using the (removed) phone number. Luckily I was able to get a hold of it and get the code, but even after adding a TOTP and security key 2FA, further logins still required SMS.

It feels like the security team made this change to reduce account hijacking but it's at complete odds with the recovery flow and modern security practices. Better hope your phone number doesn't get hijacked or recycled because it's the key to your account now, security keys be damned.

qingcharles2• 4 months ago

Google enabled 2FA on my Gmail account without any prior notice. I have the username, password, recovery email, and all emails from the account are forwarded to my Fastmail, but I can't ever log into the account again because it is trying to do 2FA by SMS to a number I don't have.

I've tried everything to find someone inside Google to fix this, but so far no luck. At least with Meta you can find someone on a forum like Swapd who will take a small bribe to fix these issues.

justinclift3• 4 months ago

At least with Meta you can find someone on a forum like Swapd who will take a small bribe ...

That sounds like its own kind of problems. (!)

atomicfiredoll• 4 months ago

Very similar situation. I could even see information being sent to the recovery email. So, when the time came to setup my business, I chose Zoho and avoid Google whenever possible.

subscribed3• 4 months ago

My SO has identical situation. Identical. She still receives emails for this account because she set forwarding years ago, I still get notifications because I'm set as a recovery account, but without the phone she doesn't have for the last 15 years we have no way of logging in.

We have everything else but this alone is not enough.

subscribed3• 4 months ago

You could rephrase this meta thing as "Meta employee can successfully coerce an adult into sex by promising Instagram account unban" - more accurate IMO: https://showtime-fqi8q.s3.amazonaws.com/onlyfans-star-slept-...

TimBurman2• 4 months ago

You could try logging into Gmail just to the point before the SMS is sent, then phone the number you used to have and speak to the current owner. Apologize that you forgot to take the number off your account and so they are receiving text messages meant for you, but you would like to get one more message from them and they won't be bothered anymore. Then you will switch to a new number on your Gmail and they will not receive your messages. Many people will be happy to help a stranger if you are nice and polite to them.

The other option is to contact the phone company and explain, asking an open ended question if there is any way they could help you, with the permission of the current owner of the number, to get one more text message and move your Gmail to a new number. It doesn't sound in any way like you are trying to pull a scam, so they might help.

Jimmc414• 4 months ago

Google needs to understand that watching this nightmare scenario play out over and over again is actively destroying trust in their platform. When your email, authentication, documents, payroll, and CRM all flow through a single provider and that provider can lock you out overnight with no meaningful recourse, you’ve invited customers to place their entire digital presence into a house of cards. The fact that this same story surfaces almost daily should be a wake up call to existing and prospective customers. Every unresolved lockout is one more reason to start planning an exit. Google has led the effort to lower the bar so much that it’s commonplace and somehow acceptable to ghost paying customers who youve locked out or even worse bounce them through a gauntlet of AI chat bots with the illusion that you are even aware of the damage you’ve caused.

tracerbulletx• 4 months ago

Yeah, loss of a google account in certain cases can destroy entire small businesses and there's no recourse. In the old world we had extremely deep bodies of case law around utilities and commercial leases and road access, insurance and all kinds of things to make business operation legally predictable, but for the digital equivalent it's still the wild west and everyone just throws up their hands like its unavoidable.

macintux• 4 months ago

Imagine being homeless, and your Gmail account is your online identity for what little financial presence you have, and how in the world can you recover from its loss?

Rastonbury• 4 months ago

On the surface it seems like it would be a good idea for all these users who were suspended to do a mass arbitration like what happened to Uber to get them to start taking it seriously, this comes up like monthly people getting account pulled up from under them and impacting business. Maybe there a legal differences or something https://www.mbelr.org/mass-arbitration-how-ubers-own-alterna...

Spooky233• 4 months ago

I don’t disagree, but the reality is SaaS is the model that most companies depend on and these risks exist everywhere.

If your business is dependent on services you need to take a modicum of effort to protect yourself - the posts author was literally walking around with his entire business at risk from him dropping his phone or having it pickpocketed.

At the end of the day, the protagonist in this story is mad because Google won’t allow him to social engineer access to his company. He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.

quadrifoliate4• 4 months ago

He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.

Are we reading the same blog post? He had his password, 2FA authenticator set up, and backup codes -- everything Google asks you to have to be on the "golden" auth path.

He only deleted his SMS authentication path (one thing I don't understand is how he was able to do this in the first place without being logged in), which is in any case the least secure method of 2FA. Also, It should be fairly obvious that SMS is not expected to work seamlessly while traveling, how is this not a scenario that's hit by millions of Google users worldwide?

welder• 4 months ago

I removed my phone number from the account. I am travelling to the UK for a short period and did not want to have roaming on my Australian phone.

So for my own notes, removing a phone number from my Google account before travel will risk account suspension. Hope OP resolves it, but also need to make sure this never happens to me.

r_lee• 4 months ago

this is actually scary as fuck

I thought with Workspace you'd actually be spared from this kind of BS

I guess not?

Lihh272• 4 months ago

you're paying for the privilege of getting locked out by the same algorithm that locks out free accounts. the only difference is you get an invoice.

andrewjneumann• 4 months ago

If you’re operating Google workspace without a well oiled Enterprise behind the scenes, a single admin account is a single point of failure.

I had this happen a couple years ago when I was migrating to a different domain. The only difference was all of the authentication that I supplied Google said was an adequate and I got into some sort of a login loop where Authenticator, SMS, DNS record nor pass key would provide enough authentication for me to get in.

I got the automated got bought to finally send me the mythical form, after completing that I was told that they were unable to authenticate me further. I ended up emailing their support multiple times and threatening lawsuits multiple times when I got a magic call from a human at Google. They also sent me the link that put me into a login loop however after chatting with them for nearly an hour I got a different magic login link form which appeared to work.

jimbocyou3• 4 months ago

OP triggered every possible red flags for suspicious account takeover in Google systems: deleting his recovery phone number, moving to another country and cellular provider. And then he gets surprised that the account is in 30 day cool down period??? I don't understand people sometimes.

Hackbraten2• 4 months ago

They didn't willfully delete their recovery phone number. They tried to delete a shitty, known-broken 2FA mechanism after they had set up passkeys. Poor UX conflated the two things, so their recovery phone number ended up being deleted. This is 100% on Google.

Why the fuck would Google care in which country I live? It's a personal decision, and no corporation should have any say in this. They certainly don't have to flag an account for that, especially not if the account has 2FA enabled. This is on Google, too.

Your comment is victim blaming.

jimbocyou3• 4 months ago

The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider. There is no way to differentiate, at scale, between an account takeover currently in progress that needs to be stopped immediately to minimize damage, and a legit user deciding to change all his personal info at once.

30 day cool down period is a reasonable response, at scale.

zenincognito3• 4 months ago

Have backup codes, Passkey, access to the said number, same laptop logged in, phone logged in, recovery email address access and nothing works...

hayatofujihara• 4 months ago

Tough situation. A good reminder to set up a backup recovery method before removing the existing one, especially when traveling.

e402• 4 months ago

This is why I do full Google Takeout every 2 months and have my own domain with Workspace. I don't rely on cloud file storage. The calendar is important, but I could switch easily.

IMO, the worst part of this is Workspace support is immune to ANY explanation. I mean, credit card companies are well used to "is this your transaction?" emails.

ryandrake• 4 months ago

It's been [0] days since the last "Cloud provider banned me and I lost everything" article.

Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.

Does life just go on, since you don't have anything important hosted there? (Best Case)

Do you lose some precious family photos and use it as a tough learning opportunity to stop doing what you're doing? (Next best)

Do you lose access to your E-mail and are suddenly not able to do 2FA, reset passwords, communicate with the company or the Internet in any way, and so on, and now have to panic?

Do you complain online, hoping that someone in the company sees your post and has the ability to restore your account, which you then continue to use because you learned nothing?

Having an online account suddenly suspended is a real, non-zero, but unlikely risk. You should at least have a disaster plan if you rely on these things for anything important. Or better yet, stop relying on them for important things like your identity or precious files!

chromacity• 4 months ago

Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.

This is one of the most common sentiments I hear expressed on HN, next only to "if you're not building your software business around Claude Code, you're gonna left behind".

mppm• 4 months ago

"A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -- Robert de Niro

supliminal• 4 months ago

To me, the action is the juice.

DaedalusII• 4 months ago

google is worst because normal people with no tech experience can accidentally get banned from the only email account they ever had since 2005 which has all their insurance tax resumes family photo etc , never even understand how it happened , or fix it

tsoukase2• 4 months ago

I'm one such person among the billions worldwide, that is a minority on this forum.

calvinmorrison3• 4 months ago

It's been [0] days since the "business I contract with to provide services locked me out of the building we rent, ghosted me, and threw all my shit out" article.

We really need to just fix the laws.

quadrifoliate4• 4 months ago

We really need to just fix the laws.

This. There are something like 150 million Americans with a Google account, and these days it is more important than a phone number to have a working email.

Email is a utility. Email companies should be heavily regulated and controlled like phone or other utility companies.

anotherevan• 4 months ago

In the case of Google Workspace for our company, I'm using Cubebackup[1]. I've been going through the disaster recovery exercises lately, and thinking about what I've been calling "external backups", which are backups of a service that are stored and restorable outside that service.

It can be surprisingly difficult with a lot of SaaS products (including Google).

[1] https://www.cubebackup.com/

antisol2• 4 months ago

Yeah. And every time I see a new "cloud provider banned me and I lost everything" article (i.e: every few days), I always just want to ask the same question(s):

"I'm sure it's very sad that you've lost all your [email|calendar|photos|whatever]... but, were you, a person who has chosen to rely on a service provided by a cloud provider with a track record which goes back well over 15 years of locking people out of their accounts with no recourse for the user, not aware that said provider has a track record of doing so, in some cases without even giving an explanation why?

Were you not aware that the service you were relying on them for was critically important to you? Or were you unaware that the provider of this service has the capability to completely disable the service you're relying on with the simple flip of a switch?

I'm fascinated by this decision you've made - could you please explain the thought process by which you chose to use this service which you have no control over for critical things?"

Terr_• 4 months ago

Come now, are those really the rhetorical questions you'd fling at your Aunt Tillie panicking on the phone, because she can't email anybody or renew her important drug prescriptions or whatever?

Most people expect better because in most other walks of life it is better with some kind of plausible appeal route, and the deficiencies we're discussing don't really get publicized. These service-outcomes are the outliers in need of repair, not the consumers.

myultidevhq• 4 months ago

The 40+ hour window with no human contact is the part that hurts most. Small things that would be fixable with a 5-minute call compound fast when payroll is missing. Do team members still have access to their individual accounts during the suspension, or is everyone locked out?

827a2• 4 months ago

Google's customer support is interesting. Its definitely a case where you'll sometimes hit pockets of the company where clearly there was someone who made it their life's work to fix this bad reputation they have; while other pockets make it clear that they deserve the reputation.

I had a Nest subscription that became a total mess. If you've ever tried to use Nest before, or are coming from a legacy Nest account, and/or also have a Workspace account that somehow got wrapped up in the mess, you'll understand how much of a clusterf Nest is for the Google ecosystem. I had signed up for this subscription on a personal Google account, cancelled it, but was still being charged for it, and the credit card being used made me think it was getting charged on my Google Workspace account (which isn't officially supported, and would never let you sign up for it, but DID share an email address with my legacy Nest account I had migrated into the non-Workspace personal account I was using for Nest).

They had to escalate the problem a couple times, which took ~24 hours. Once that happened, their rep had it resolved in minutes, and refunded me two months on the subscription.

The biggest piece of advice I can give when dealing with Google is: Never be weird. You cannot ever put yourself in a situation where your account isn't like the other billion accounts they have. If you do, something will go wrong and its rolling the dice on whether you'll ever reach someone who can help you. If you've used Google enough, you know: Their multifactor settings are weird. You cannot set it up exactly how you want; it'll always trigger some auth method you didn't configure but they have "LATENT KNOWLEDGE" you should be able to authenticate with, like a phone number you configured six years ago, or gmail installed on a tablet that's 400 miles away, and you can't turn it off, even on Workspace.

My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to do before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there. Even on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing website in their core auth flows.

Mess of a company. I hope they invest some effort in improving things, but I was saying the same thing in 2018. They probably won't.

nullc• 4 months ago

like a phone number you configured six years ago

I've put in a heroic effort to make sure they never get a phone number, specifically so they can't start handing my account over to the first clown who simswaps me, and have been successful. Unfortunately, this makes my account weird, which as you noted is fatal.

Ferret74462• 4 months ago

My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to do before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there. Even on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing website in their core auth flows.

I assume that's just because they need to set a cookie on the YouTube domain in case you visit YouTube later on the workspace account, and not "load bearing"in the manner you insinuate

827a2• 4 months ago

If the youtube.com 302 failed to itself 302 back to the next destination; because the site is down; would that not be load bearing?

jeffbee2• 4 months ago

If you wanted to intentionally trigger every account abuse system at Google, follow this guy's script.

sfmike2• 4 months ago

people who travel shouldn't trigger account abuse

jeffbee2• 4 months ago

Changing your account recovery and 2FA settings then immediately trying to recover your account from an unusual country should temporarily lock out your account, every time, and this is what all normal users want.

herewulf3• 4 months ago

Recently I cleaned up a SMB client's Workspace users after archiving their data (former employee accounts that had been languishing). In the space of a day or two I did the following for half the ~20 total accounts:

  - Moved to no 2FA sub-organization
  - Reset password
  - Disabled security check for ten minutes
  - Logged in as the user in a fresh browser profile
  - Exported data with Takeout
  - Deleted the account in the admin console

I fully expected to hit some kind of roadblock or delay or for alarm bells to go off for the other admins, but nope, I literally "absconded" with hundreds of gigabytes of data and nuked half the org in short order.

There is a Workspace Admin option to export users' data but it warns of an automatic 48 hour delay to let "other admins take action" if something is amiss. The client wanted the task done before getting hit with the full monthly license fees again so I had to go the manual route.

Granted, out of paranoia, I was using the client's office VPN as my traffic egress so maybe that helped.

Arcuru• 4 months ago

If a service offers "Login with Google/Apple/Facebook/etc" you should never do that if they offer a username/password. It just increases the single point of failure. Avoid places that only offer the "Login with Foo" if at all possible (looking at you Tailscale).

As an ex-googler, the only reason I was comfortable keeping even my personal email there was because I could reach out internally if there was a problem. I left Google, and left gmail behind too.

gib444• 4 months ago

Avoid places that only offer the "Login with Foo" if at all possible (looking at you Tailscale).

Tailscale is the only serious company that I can ever recall offering /only/ third party login. It's bit bizarre on the face of it. Anyone know the reason?

drcongo2• 4 months ago

Curious isn't it, especially as it's such a bad fit for their product - authenticating with GitHub in order to ssh made the whole thing so much more painful than it needed to be. I subsequently tried switching to using a passkey when that became an option, but it's not possible to make the passkey user the owner of a tailnet created by a GitHub org user, so I'm stuck with two users in my Tailscale and can't delete the GitHub org user. It's the main thing that keeps me looking for a reliable alternative to Tailscale.

ratorx• 4 months ago

I think I read somewhere (but could be wrong) that it was because they didn’t want to own any “authentication” services. Their infrastructure was zero trust (as in they don’t hold any passwords or private keys), just a discovery server for different devices.

FireBeyond2• 4 months ago

My other annoyance lately is companies that don't let you set a password. It's either passkey only (which I'm not sold on, yet), or "we'll email you a login link". Great, now I have to wait for the email to show up, click the link, hope it doesn't expire if I get distracted while waiting, and then also delete your emails, sometimes multiple times a day?

What a shit tier authentication mechanism.

Kwpolska• 4 months ago

Perhaps they are not a serious company after all?

antonvs• 4 months ago

Is Tailscale really a serious company?

huslage• 4 months ago

I use my own OIDC connection to Tailscale. I don't use a third party for login. It's not hard to set up.

benhurmarcel• 4 months ago

Spotify did this for years in the beginning too. I remember this was the reason I didn’t use them until they proposed email logins.

navigate8310• 4 months ago

Tailscale offers custom SSO for free

nottorp2• 4 months ago

Shouldn't a service that may be the only way of remotely accessing your devices be ... independent of a 3rd party authentication service?

shakna• 4 months ago

One of the other articles on HN's front page right now, is that Germany's implementation of eIDAS will require a Google or Apple account.

Imustaskforhelp• 4 months ago

I genuinely feel like there is something happening where hackernews articles come in bunch/reference-to-each-other :]

So one of the comments on one hackernews post on front-page almost somehow always refer to something within a hackernews post on the same front-page. I have seen this witnessed too many times that it might be time to name this phenomenon.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe• 4 months ago

For those like who who've never heard of eIDAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS

brokenmachine• 3 months ago

Wow, that's so amazingly terrible that I'm sure my Australian government is planning it right now.

suzzer992• 4 months ago

We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps. The fun part is both FB and Google started blocking Selenium and any other automated agents from logging in. So basically there's no way to run end to end tests that confirm the login flows using FB or Google, which have wrinkles that our normal login doesn't hit.

drnick12• 4 months ago

We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps.

This has the nefarious side effect of allowing Google or Facebook to track people across the Internet and apps. Webmasters like you are, often for no imperative reason, complicit of this by providing such login options.

lukeschlather• 4 months ago

On Saturday, April 4, at 5:06 AM, I received a notification saying my authenticator had been removed. It hadn’t. The authenticator was still active on my phone - it was the recovery phone I had removed. Google apparently conflated the two.

This is a massive bug here. I was also surprised recently that Google won't let you enroll multiple Authenticators. If we had functional security regulations I think there would be some pretty large fines for Google's error here.

caerwy• 4 months ago

These kind of stories led me to explore de-googling my digital life. And honestly its been a fun journey and given meaning and purpose to my homelab. 100% recommend. Own your digital life, run local, reclaim the web.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

Thanks for the great reminder to detangle myself from Google.

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 4 months ago

I discovered this same issue, you are required to have a phone their auth system is bugged me.

I just set up google workspace and I didn't have recovery phone or anything,just password and recovery email. I didn't login for 1 week (life stuff). When I came back it allowed me to login but didn't allow any admin stuff saying it didn't recognize me and that I must use a known browser.

Well, that was the only browser I logged in with.

The solution was a weird thing where I was able to add phone recovery and authenticator, but then had to wait 2 weeks (couldn't use it). After that I performed authentication as usual.

It's horrible.

finaard• 4 months ago

It's quite entertaining to read - most of the article is pretty much elaborating a chain of bad decisions by the author which all lead to this now being a big problem. If he'd have written a similar dependency tree earlier and just thought about it for a few minutes that should've been avoidable.

Update 1 - I know I can simply change the MX record to someone else but It has its own challenges.

I don't quite get that attitude. He's describing that he needs his business emails. Not just getting a mail server back online for that, even as interim solution, points to the opposite. In the time it takes for MX TTL to expire he could easily just throw up a postfix+dovecot on some VPS, with enough time to spare to add something like sogo if he feels fancy.

bartvk• 4 months ago

That's what I didn't get either. And you don't even need to configure a VPS, there's Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Kolabnow, Purely mail, Migadu and so much more.

jzl• 4 months ago

Why victim blame him for removing the phone number? He had a logical reason for doing so, and with Google supporting many forms of authentication it's perfectly reasonable to think that removing one wouldn't jeopardize the other methods.

matt_heimer• 4 months ago

I was a bit worried when I saw the title of the article because I have one of these accounts but geez he made some bad choices. Deleting all phone numbers and the recovery and swapping to a new authentication method and then accessing from a different country??? No wonder it got flagged.

I probably wouldn't believe him either. Google should have an option to revert to the last trusted config after some verification method. Google support is bad, I'll give him that.

All this to avoid roaming charges? And then refusing to share a personal email in this scenario and missing meetings because of that.

I'd argue that changing the MX to fastmail or Microsoft would be much faster than a postfix+dovecot solution on a VPS but I think he's just refusing any solution based on his principals.

bradley13• 4 months ago

With phone numbers, you can move from one carrier to another, while retaining your number. This helps with competition.

We need the same for email.

Sure, it may not work with the ancillary services, but keeping your email address would solve a lot of issues.

phpnode• 4 months ago

I mean, you can do that already, you use your own domain name and can then change email providers at will, in theory.

But maybe you logged in to your domain registrar through google oauth. If your google account is locked you can't now get into your domain's settings to change your MX records.

The real problem isn't the email address itself, it's all the access that google owns on your behalf. Lose access to Google, lose access to everything.

rglover• 4 months ago

Just had to fix an AWS account lock out this morning. Why? Despite having a $0 balance and payment info on file, until I set a budget (a new feature per their UI), all of my Cloudfront-hosted files were just unavailable on my business' site (I Cloudfront all static assets so all images, fonts, etc were just broken all of a sudden).

These are the limits of scale. Too big, too complex, and not enough skilled people to maintain and/or support it. And our hubris as humans prevents us from accepting it. Why? Why can't we accept smaller but more functional things/systems?

We don't have to live like this.

deepsun• 4 months ago

I tried to read it assuming the blog post author is a hacker. The hacker could have stolen an OTP device with DNS access, but couldn't steal for the phone number (so they removed it, there was no explanation why phone number is removed). And honestly, how else could they prove they are legit? What if they really are a hacker?

It would be cool if Google (and other media giants, especially IdP ones) had an office where you could bring your passport and verify it's you. I don't think there is.

alwa• 4 months ago

I’d hate for the “government-name” verification to become a requirement, but I’ve long wished services would at least offer that as an optional add-on. For certain important accounts, I’d be eager to place my government identity on file with the company ahead of time.

The Americans have done something kind of interesting along those lines, as far as an in-person IDV option to establish e-government accounts [0]. You start account setup online, then take a barcode to a post office along with your identity documents.

I have to imagine it’s hard to make a commercial case for such a system, though… especially these days with so much momentum toward the approach I resent—that is, requiring ID checks just to be online in the first place.

[0] https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-...

wvenable• 4 months ago

Now try and read it assuming that instead of a screw up, this user was actually hacked. How do they recover?

Honestly, if you are using Gmail as your primary email I could probably ruin your entire year. I could just try and hack you (not even successfully) and Google will just shut down your entire life rather than attempt to work out who's right.

gck1• 4 months ago

I could just try and hack you (not even successfully) and Google will just shut down your entire life rather than attempt to work out who's right.

Had this happen to me. Fortunately the 'attacker' wasn't actually trying to do this, so damage was limited, but it's chilling when you think about what some motivated script kiddy can do with your Google account just by requesting password resets.

LoganDark• 4 months ago

I failed the Apple Developer ID verification four times due to technical issues and now my account is ineligible to become a developer.

Forever.

drnick12• 4 months ago

Run your own email server, and give Google the middle finger. Letting Google own your email, and freely spy on your communications is insane. I think this incident clearly demonstrates that you cannot leave critical infrastructure like this in the hands of a third party.

zenincognito3• 4 months ago

Update: A kind stranger from Google reached out and this is now resolved. Thank you HN for helping me through this.

entrox• 4 months ago

It is quite frankly ridiculous that you need to be in the "in-group" to get things like this resolved and it is not the first time this has been reported, be it Google or Meta or any other big tech corpo.

These players MUST be regulated or treated like utilities; hoping the EU will ratchet up the pressure even more.

storus• 4 months ago

I keep paying ElevenLabs for 3 years after some early AI agent project where I used it as my payment data is bound to a google account associated with a phone number that expired in the meantime. I thought adding the google authenticator to the account and switching to it as a secondary authentication method from the phone number would allow me to cancel the subscription, but for some reason Google insists I verify using the expired phone number...

tsoukase2• 4 months ago

The full text of Google's slogan is: Don't be evil (to customers that click ads from which our largest income share comes but not to developers who in the future might be our competitors).

It's just too long to fit on a T-shirt but not to memorise.

latchkey• 4 months ago

3) Removed recovery phone

Never put your phone in there in the first place. You can actually skip that step.

kkfx• 4 months ago

It's simply about time to own your digital life instead of being slave of someone else.

econ• 4 months ago

I wonder, will big tech adopt the EU Digital Identity? Or will they have to be forced?

It would dramatically improve the service.

ThePowerOfFuet• 4 months ago

Update 1 - I know I can simply change the MX record to someone else but It has its own challenges.
Update 2 - Sadly, its 2 PM in the UK and I will miss the meeting that I had scheduled via Google Meet because emails are not working

Srsly?

Andrex• 4 months ago

This story is the typical "got banned, complained on HN, only then did Google see fit to actually help me" however I'm surprised that before this was posted he WAS able to actually talk to someone from Google on the phone.

I legitimately thought that was impossible, so, uh, baby steps?

cadamsdotcom• 4 months ago

25 years ago my friends and I all had hard drives crash, and lost my data” experience. Corporate cancelation is harder to mitigate - but far rarer. The way things work un 2026 is very friendly to normies.

But you dear HNer ain’t a normie!

You have the skills to migrate your stuff away. It is time to pull the trigger.

My Google Workspace account suspension

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