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Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned
Google support is refusing to let us know what happened and not even giving access to retrieve emails to other drive data.
We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.
Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoyou should probably switch to own setup for as many services as possible if they even let you in. once bitten, twice shy
- scottrogowski 6y agoWhile unscientific, I've noticed an increasing frequency of "[FAANG company] banned me from [service I literally need to live] and I don't know why" posts over the past few months. My personal google account is permanently suspended from Adwords over my, no joke, chess-over-videochat website that I tried to advertise last year. Just like you, Google refused to let me know what exactly I had done wrong even after multiple emails, appeals, etc. At some point, we need to recognize this for what it is - unregulated monopolies having no accountability. I'm wondering whether there are legal actions that people can take. Many years ago, I was having a problem with Anthem "losing" my insurance claims. Eventually, I got sufficiently frustrated and filed a complaint with the California Attorney General. Shortly after that, I got a long letter of apology, a promise to open an internal investigation, and most importantly, finally got my insurance claims processed.
- ncmncm 6y agoIt is very helpful to know that this can work. Insurance companies have unique regulatory requirements specifically because they used to do what Google does now: ghosting paid-up customers. In their case, many insurance companies welcomed regulation to maintain a level playing field. It would otherwise become too easy for some to collect premiums but not pay out obligations, and thereby be able to undercut more honest companies. But for this to work, state Attorneys General need to take enforcement seriously, and resist capture. California's Attorney General is elected, which helps there.
- thu2111 6y agoWhy is that unique to insurance? Taking money for a service and then not providing is just normal fraud, it's unclear why you'd need insurance-specific regulations for that beyond ordinary contract law.
- codingdave 6y agoBecause people who need insurance are already suffering from a loss. Having to sue the insurance company for fraud would be just adding insult to injury, and would be unattainable for many people who cannot afford to open lawsuits. Pre-emptively putting mechanisms in place so you don't have to go to court to get your insurance claims handled makes insurance work with society.
- Asooka 6y agoThe similarity is that you are insuring against a specific event with a lot of caveats. As a silly example, if you insure your house against fire damage and then light it on fire yourself intentionally, you're not getting anything. The insurance policy may not even cover accidental fire damage if it was due to your own negligence, e.g. operating an unsafe fireplace. Given all these terms and stipulations, it's easy for the insurance company to say the policy doesn't cover the specific event that led to your loss, even if it should. Which is when you have to take them to court. So in the interest of keeping the insurance business an actual legitimate business people trust, you have oversight.
- thu2111 6y agoYes, but that answer doesn't explain why anything insurance specific is needed. Courts can rule on contract disputes regardless of how complex they are.
- ncmncm 6y agoCourts take a long time to rule on complex contract disputes. The whole point of insurance is that you need the money now, not years later, as was already explained nearby: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25902290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25902290>. Insurance payouts delayed are insurance payouts denied. There are Nash equilibria at many different points on the curve, but only a narrow range where the value proposition of insurance is appealing to potential customers. An Insurance Commission's job is to force it into the range where negligence and arson are not paid, but genuine misfortune is paid immediately.
- tomerbd 6y agoWhy? Who did you vote for?
- mlang23 6y agoDon't use Google. If the Internet is your main bussiness, take it seriously and don't let a third party control your independence. Yes, it is more work, but somewhere down the road that work will pay off compared to your competitors.
- swayson 6y agoFor such a highly valued organisation, they really do appear to not prioritise customers. Such a wealth of resources, yet these things manifest often. Google's reputation for me is diminishing gradually every year.
- qmarchi 6y agoGoogler here, feel free to email me at what's listed on my profile. Please make sure to include the following information: - Domain - Your Domain Admin's Email - Any Google contacts that you're supposed to have I'll do my best to have one of the Workspace agents reach out. I work closely with them, so should be pretty easy. :+1: Generally, I've seen issue like this where a bad Apps Extension is added or various other external, but generraly preventable things happen.
- austhrow743 6y agoThe email section of your profile is only between you and ycombinator. You need to put it in the about section if you want other users to be able to see it.
- mkl 6y agoAnd both links in said profile are 404s, in case you thought there was a way to contact you from there.
- qmarchi 6y agoI stopped using Keybase after they got into the whole crypto thing, never ended up updating my profile.
- qmarchi 6y agoAh, got me there. I've gone ahead and updated it with the relevant info!
- CyanLite4 6y agoPerhaps the OP is the CEO of Parler?
- crb002 6y agoCall the Council Bluffs police in Iowa where they have a major data center. Report you suspect an unauthorized employee may have locked you out of your accounts in violation of Iowa's computer trespass law.
- ultrablack 6y agoOur new tech overlords makes Microsoft look benevolent...
- Ekaros 6y agoOverall MS have been benevolent when you are in their ecosystem. People often miss just what lengths do they go to support their customers. Like compatibility they have done on Windows. Almost as if providing decent enough service to keep people stuck as their customers is a decent idea...
- thallium205 6y agoFind an insider at Google. It's honestly the only way to get any answers.
- ameyv 6y agoThanks! Also trying that out.
- patatino 6y agoUpvoted! I hope someone at Google reads this! What a sad time when your best chance at getting a human interaction is to cry for help in forums.
- rangoon626 6y agoTime to move back to on prem services. These companies clearly don’t deserve the trust.
- flukus 6y agoDon't know why this is downvoted, on prem is the only sure fire way to ensure something like this doesn't happen. Even that can sometimes be iffy with licensing services.
- villgax 6y agoGood luck with that
- _Codemonkeyism 6y agoYou're probably glad that you had the basics in place and made regular back ups of your data. Hopefully you didn't follow the "it's in the cloud so I don't need to backup" philosophy.
- cpach 6y ago“Hopefully you didn't follow the ‘it's in the cloud so I don’t need to backup’ philosophy.” When someone first said that to me I was 100% sure they were joking. Then I realized they weren’t joking at all.
- cylde_frog 6y agoRule of the internet: if anyone posts about losing data there will be a snarky comment about keeping backups
- aussiedude 6y agoAt least with office 365 you have a cached version of your email. Google drive is hard as the only way is to setup continuous Google takeout's or use a third party service for backups which the last time I looked several years ago.
- mitchdaily 6y agoGoogle is just as hard to get in. Transferring from Gmail into gsuite took over 3 weeks for a single account
- _Codemonkeyism 6y agoAnd still, after years and years and years people do not have backups, especially if they have their data in the cloud. From my experience the number of backups people make went down not up. If my comment helped one iota to make backups more likely next time, I did good.
- aaomidi 6y agoWhat's the point of kicking someone when they're down? Like does this give you a sense of superiority?
- rapsey 6y agoOn our companies tiny MS email+office account we never had issues getting support by a person. Being as google less as possible nowadays is just common sense.
- meddlepal 6y agoThe annual Google bit my hand thread. I just cannot recommend anyone seriously use GSuite or GCP until Google starts treating customers better.
- technion 6y agoThere is definitely a bubble effect here. Every trendy startup seems to use gsuite, but you'd be looked at quite strangely if you suggested it in some of the circles I've worked in.
- edp 6y agoAnd yet, my father works at Airbus and they switched to gsuite last year. Needless to say, the transition from excel to gsheets is not easy, but he's learning javascript in the process.
- rootsudo 6y agoWow, really? That's insane. I wouldn't/couldn't imagine a company move away from Excel, wow. Wow.
- Clewza313 6y agoGoogle Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does and most existing sheets can be imported as is. Of course, odds are that the company's One Critical Sheet that reimplements SAP in Excel is critically reliant on the 4DMATRIXTRANSFORM.OLDCHURCHSLAVONIC() function that falls into the remaining 1%.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Google Sheets supports 99% of what Excel does VBA is more than 1%, and Sheets doesn't support it at all.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
- Androider 6y agoOut of curiosity, did you make use Google Cloud Platform? I don't think I'm the only business owner who is wary of using GCP for anything, as it vastly increases the surface area of unintentional or malicious actions that could make our Google Workspace and all our data in it go poof with no recourse.
- zachberger 6y agoIf there were a Googler here willing to help you you haven't given them much to go on. Your profile has no contact information, you haven't shared a support case number, you haven't even shared your company's name or domain.
- Clewza313 6y agoThis. Also, while I have no clue what happened in the OP's case, many of these "Google nuked my account for no reason at all!" stories turn out to have darn good reasons, so being cagey is not going to help you.
- atoav 6y agoI understand that there might be two sides to these stories, but I don't get how anybody ever would rely fully on Google for their companies mission critical infrastructure unless it is something like a lemonade stand. If you have a specific contract with Google that manages reliability/availability sufficiently that would be sth. else, but who has that? It may be that I am out of touch with the other HN users on this one, but "$megacorp does something that on purpose/accidentally blocks my service" doesn't surprise me at all. That the megacorp is legally in the right on their own turf is even less unsurprising and not the point. There is a price to not running your own infrastructure and this price becomes tangible when something like this happens for whatever reason.
- tpoacher 6y agoIndeed. OP is painfully finding out why the visible costs of using open alternatives are massively outweighed by the hidden costs of not using them.
- vfclists 6y agoIf you had a point to make you wouldn't be using a new throwaway account.
- _zamorano_ 6y agoPerhaps he's not even authorized to share such information.
- 1cvmask 6y agoThis is so unfortunate to you. Can you tell us what business you are in? Any chance that you compete with a Google service? Or some business that Google may think is not worthy like say gambling? That of course can never justify such an action. Perhaps having a lawyer reach out to them may work.
- mike_d 6y agoYou can contact support by signing in as the domain admin to admin.google.com and clicking on the question mark in the upper right. Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately? Google rarely shuts down Gsuite domains without a good reason. If they really aren't telling you the reason - it is abuse related. (Former Googler, opinions are my own, etc etc)
- jamesrcole 6y ago> You can contact support by... It sounds like they've already contacted support. They said "Google support is refusing to let us know what happened" and "no one is providing us any answers or providing support".
- raverbashing 6y agoWhereas "abuse" might mean anything they don't like, like a picture on your drive, or a misconfiguration, etc > Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately? Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? I know, some of those apps are crap, but banning an entire org because of that? Good to know that even paying customers are treated by Google as the product
- na85 6y ago>Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? It's not your mailbox with Google.
- loosescrews 6y agoI think the implication is that the sales people may have been sending spam email outside of the organization.
- mike_d 6y agoNo, Google absolutely does not care what you do in your mailbox. They care when you shit in other peoples mailboxes. I won't get in to specifics, but the first few times the user will get spanked. If you keep reenabling accounts that send spam, eventually the domain as a whole gets spanked.
- dirtylowprofile 6y ago2 years ago my post went viral here and someone from Google contacted me on LinkedIn, I’ll find him asap. Edited: I have his Google email but I’m not sure if I can post it here. Email me instead at lawgimenez@hey.com https://lwgmnz.me/2018/08/05/g-suite-horror-story/ https://lwgmnz.me/2018/08/05/g-suite-horror-story/
- theshrike79 6y agoNot related, but how's hey.com been? The hype by dhh was some next level stuff, but is the service actually good and usable?
- dirtylowprofile 6y agoYeah hey’s been usable enough, been using it since the early invites. It has some pretty neat features that I can’t find on regular email. Also, I can post my hey email publicly because I can filter it before it goes to my Imbox. But it is kinda slow but I’m hoping it will improve by version 2.0 or 3.0.
- ameyv 6y agoThanks. Sorry for delay in commenting on thread. Will put more details here.
- eyeareque 6y agoThe ol “google won’t reply” post on HN support angle. If you make them look bad enough for their failures they usually respond. Good luck.
- sub7 6y agoWelcome to the future friend
- msh 6y agoHi takeout.google.com should work even when the accounts is banned.
- anm89 6y agoMy friend was kicked off of Instagram and took it self represented to the New Hampshire Supreme Court and won because of the fact it was a paid account which I believe he argued meant there was a breach of contract in terminating the account. https://www.businessnhmagazine.com/article/soldati-wins-unanimous-decision-against-facebook https://www.businessnhmagazine.com/article/soldati-wins-unan... You might have similar options?
- easyas101110110 6y agoInverted totalitarian corporate plutocracy that most people accept ubiquitously and brush off as a "conspiracy theory" until it happens to them.
- cpach 6y agoThat sucks :-/ I hope Google can help you ASAP.
- alexdiacre 6y agoGreetings. Alex here from Google. I look after Workspace technical support. We'd love to look into this but need @ameyv to reach out and let us know the Workspace domain this is in reference to. I can be reached at alexd@google.com so please reach out.
- ameyv 6y agoHi Alex, thanks ..sending you email with details
- alexdiacre 6y agoGreat. I haven't seen anything yet. If you could put HackerNews and/or your username (ameyv) in the email so I can keep an eye out for it, that would be helpful.
- ameyv 6y agoApologies for late reply. It was chaos due to prior commitments, loss communication and data put us on our toes. We are recruitment firm. Domain - ton80talents.com Email - admin@ton80talents.com/ resume@ton80talents.com We are also in touch with one of the local provider (basically reseller) from whom we bought this Gsuite access.