8 ms·

Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com

110 points by priyesh2609 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yashodhanmohan 4y ago
tldr; Google screwed us big time. None of our apps are working. Google Domains abused locked and suspended our domain lyearn[.]com. There were no warnings. Support team is doing nothing and of no help. They're not allowing any access to our domain. We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere. No incoming emails can come(since DNS lookup fails), so customers also cannot contact us.
- tpxl 4y ago
  > We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere. Damn, that is shit. I can understand removing the domain and letting you transfer, but holding your domain hostage is just another level of evil.
- joshenders 4y ago
  Not that it matters necessarily but do you have any idea what could have triggered the suspension? What did you host on this site?
97amarnathk 4y ago
this happened to me too :(
- priyesh2609 4y ago
  How much time did they take to remove the suspension?
desindol 4y ago
Never use anything made by google if you don’t have to. They don’t care and they don’t have a support team. Your only chance to get anything is by making enough noise that their PR team gets involved or by going to court.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  It doesn't seem to matter how many stories show up like this, there are people who will continue to do so for some reason.
jphsnsir 4y ago
Why would you use google for your domains? Domains are important(most of the time), I use a registrar which specializes in it. If a company does less than 50% of their revenue in domains, don't use it..
- terpimost 4y ago
  Which one is it? I recently tried to fond an alternative register and was very confused by the offering. Google Domains s product looks and works pretty good
  - ratg13 4y ago
    Namecheap has been reliable for me and offers the most responsive support I've had from a registrar. Cloudflare is also a decent option if you just want a .com
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - kornhole 4y ago
    my current favorite is gandi.net. i still have some at namecheap and an anonymous one at njal.la.
ddevault 4y ago
I wish you the best of luck. I hope that everyone here will view this as an important lesson about relying on Google.
gabereiser 4y ago
I remember a few years back I worked for a startup that was all bright eyed for GCP. I warned them that GCP has a history of deplatforming and removing peoples clouds if they feel like it. They swore that Google would be a kind and just ruler. Weeks later, they were booted from GCP. Never, ever, trust, Google.
- samwestdev 4y ago
  What happened? Did they violate any ToS?
  - tyingq 4y ago
    That really shouldn't matter though. In the real world, people make mistakes, people get hacked, rogue employees do things they aren't supposed to, Google makes mistakes (oops, wrong account), and so on. A support policy that just cuts off all contact and holds your data hostage doesn't make sense. If they want to arbitrarily zap customers, then they need to support some downgraded interface that lets you extract your data, move your domain, see some explanation for why you're being booted, etc.
  - gabereiser 4y ago
    I don’t know the specifics. All I know is that one day it was gone and we had to go through hoops to get it back. We migrated to AWS within a month. Since I was more familiar with AWS, that’s the part I helped on.
mehrdada 4y ago
Simply unfortunate that one cannot rely on Google for critical stuff. The least one can do is compartmentalization across various Google account and keeping domain names, considering they are at the very root of the infrastructure chain, separate from other activities. I just [literally in the past hour] had to [unsuccessfully] deal with a Google Fi mess-up while traveling (I made the mistake of running their crappy app on the iPad, which forced me to go through some “activation” steps on first run even though SIM was already active, which in turn disabled my primary SIM and moved the primary line to iPad data SIM). I had to reactivate it on my phone using their app, by deleting and reinstalling, which eventually worked, but left the data SIM on iPad inactive. Support is of no help except to suggest shipping a new data SIM to my primary address, obviously of no help while traveling.
- code51 4y ago
  You cannot effectively "compartmentalize" when it comes to Google. It actively tries to resolve you into one person, most of the time it succeeds. Or worse, you are marked with a false positive.
prof-dr-ir 4y ago
Ehm I am very sorry and not the greatest fan of Google by a long shot, but... who are you? Why should we trust you? Again I am really sorry but I'm just missing street cred; I only see two new HN accounts and a Twitter account with 79 followers. Edit: in response to all the comments and downvotes: really, I would not be that hard to convince. How about a LinkedIn page? Glassdoor? An archived version of the site? A personal webpage? A cached Bing search result? Anything, really.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  > who are you? I suppose we'll never figure that out, because his domain is gone. Little bit cynical and circular isn't it, cull the 100 follower people, who will care, they only got 100 followers!
  - zo1 4y ago
    And if this was a coordinated deplatforming, who knows how many properties of theirs went down simultaneously, including cache from various search engines. E.g. If they used their Gmail account for emails to all those services mentioned up in the thread. Your email is your identity and it's not owned by you atm.
- croes 4y ago
  Why shouldn't we? It's not like Google didn't do such things before.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    At least ~half the 'BigCo is being unreasonable' stories here have another side where the poster was doing something terrible (eg. sharing child porn on their google drive account), and then complaining when their account gets blocked for 'no reason'. The BigCo can't typically make any comment when this happens - merely say 'we have investigated and decided to uphold the ban', and then they look unreasonable. Sometimes the unreasonable thing is done by malware on the users computer/phone, so even the user isn't aware, but from BigCo's perspective it all looks the same. BigCo processes are still opaque, but often the outcomes aren't as unreasonable as they seem.
cmeacham98 4y ago
Look, I don't want to sound like I'm victim blaming: you are a victim here and Google shouldn't have done this. However, in the future, if losing your domain incurs "heavy losses by the minute", go with a provider where you can pay for real support, not $10/year on Google domains.
- noam_compsci 4y ago
  This is entirely fair. Neglecting infrastructure investment is a business choice.
samwillis 4y ago
I think there is something to be said for having redundant domains for backend apis for an app, with redundant dns. If one was to go down have the app fall back to the other. Not much help for a web app of e-commerce business though, domains are are one single point of failure that you can’t easily fix. But it’s one of those things that isn’t mission critical while building a business and so can easily be overlooked. I see redundancy in the backend, or at least a disaster recovery plan that covers single points of failure, the same as normal backup procedures that most of us already do.
dig1 4y ago
When you pay the company for some service and the only way to reach their support is via Twitter, hoping for the best, I'd run away from that company fast as possible. Someone once said, "you are never big enough for Google to notice you", meaning, you can't pay them enough so you can have dedicated 24/7 support by real humans. People should learn by now that Google's bread and butter is search and ads. Everything else is a second citizen to them.
- johnywalks 4y ago
  I've been avoiding any google product lock in for years now. These ban cases might be rare but i would never trust them enough to build my livelihood on it.
- cft 4y ago
  Is it safe to have an Android phone? What if they decide to deplatform your Google account associated with it. What about trusting your number to Google Fi? I have both and I am nervous.
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account. Google Fi: Depends on your country's laws for how phone number transfers work.
    - signal11 4y ago
      > Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account. If you have apps, movies etc bought from Google Play — those are gone too. If you use a @gmail email address, you lose that too and you now have to tell people not use that any more.
      - cmeacham98 4y ago
        Except for buying apps, none of these have anything to do with using Android.
radiojasper 4y ago
> incurring heavy losses by the minute. if that was true, you'd have your legal department fix it instead of posting a complaint on Twitter and then cross-posting it on HN to get more traction.
- croes 4y ago
  Heavy loss is subjective. Doesn't mean it's enough to afford a legal department. $100 is nothing to some but all to others.
- priyesh2609 4y ago
  I understand your confusion here, but not all heavy losses by the minute means monetary losses. Losing on client evaluations, SLAs etc that's what I meant here. But genuine thank you for playing a role in getting us a traction.
radiojasper 4y ago
The domain is still registered until 2023-02-23 but the WHOIS records got updated today [0] Expires On: 2023-02-23 Registered On: 2015-02-23 Updated On: 2022-09-11 [0] https://who.is/whois/lyearn.com https://who.is/whois/lyearn.com I would love to see what you were hosting on this website that made google suspend your domain like that.
- riedel 4y ago
  Probably not the same thing as in 2004. I would guess it is a plain trademark thing. We recently had to cease using a domain. https://web.archive.org/web/20041127043041/http://www.ylearn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041127043041/http://www.ylearn... Multimedia Knowledge is a new and exciting educational publishing company established to provide the most up-to-date, effective, educationally sound material for 21st Century K-12 students, teachers, and the educational community. The BioScope Initiative CD-ROMs have been developed at Purdue University by an outstanding group of teachers and educators and was funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the foremost authorities in science and education in America.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - zhfliz 4y ago
    ylearn.com != lyearn.com
tyingq 4y ago
Yeah, Google is just a bad choice for domain registration, since they have that policy of just ghosting you for support. If you're going to use Google, stick to services where you can route around them if they decide they aren't going to talk to you.
- terpimost 4y ago
  Please give me too 3 alternatives
  - thiht 4y ago
    Here’s a list of 4000 alternatives: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... My personal choices would be Namecheap, Porkbun, Gandi, AWS Route 53 and Cloudflare.
  - lizardactivist 4y ago
    I don't have any at hand, but look for the registrars in your own country, and if none are good enough for you, look for registrars in the European Union. Do not use US American registrars at any cost, you will regret it eventually.
einpoklum 4y ago
(Semi-tongue-in-cheek:) If you can pin this on Google being racist against your ethnic group or whatever, you might be able to stir up enough of a scandal on social media to get Google's PR to notice. Not sure this is such a great course of action, but still probably with a better chance of success than waiting for Google to support you through regular channels.
lizardactivist 4y ago
I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of this. Imagine how many startups and great, growing ideas have been squashed because Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare etc. cut them away them in the early stages, and the news of it simply never reaches HN or whatever little corner of the internet we sit in.
prfssnl 4y ago
This is my weekly reminder to not use Google for anything essential.
hrbf 4y ago
There is a general business lesson here: don’t entrust your critical infrastructure to any provider that does not offer a direct line of communication.
moralestapia 4y ago
People here stating you shouldn't use Google for domain registration you're partly right, however, what about TLDs owned by them? I have several .app domains, so there's not really a choice there. One of those is taking off (getting lots of users/visitors) and every year they raise the price to renew it, there's nothing I can do about that as apparently they own the TLD and have the last word on it. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in their TsS there's a clause that allows them to take the domain away from me for whatever reason.
- Ayesh 4y ago
  Registry intervention isn't that common, unless it affects the domain name itself. I think the two most common encounters would be UDPR cases and government take down demands. I don't think any TLD owner will bend over backwards to protect the registrant in cases like this. They will just comply and move on. For Google, though, the worst I imagine is their TLD nameservers using their logs to rank your domains for search results.
nurettin 4y ago
counter-anecdote: rookie dev left keys in the open, cloud account got hacked, google detected suspicious activity, suspended the account immediately after, we appealed, they responded within the day and vaiwed the extra cost. It was a good day for us.
priyesh2609 4y ago
Edit: Google has now resolved the issue, and we're up again. Expedited help from Google. Thanks a lot! Reason mentioned being one of our customer's account was involved in phishing. We're checking this internally. To Community: Appreciate all your efforts in giving us the traction/momentum. It shows us that there are lots of helpful & caring people in the community, I would love to be of any help to other members in the community, to assist in anyway possible. Thanks & Regards
midislack 4y ago
Why do small startups even use cloud computing? Seems wasteful.

110 points by priyesh2609 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tldr; Google screwed us big time. None of our apps are working. Google Domains abused locked and suspended our domain lyearn[.]com. There were no warnings. Support team is doing nothing and of no help. They're not allowing any access to our domain. We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere. No incoming emails can come(since DNS lookup fails), so customers also cannot contact us.

tpxl 4y ago
> We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere. Damn, that is shit. I can understand removing the domain and letting you transfer, but holding your domain hostage is just another level of evil.
joshenders 4y ago
Not that it matters necessarily but do you have any idea what could have triggered the suspension? What did you host on this site?

97amarnathk 4y ago

this happened to me too :(

priyesh2609 4y ago
How much time did they take to remove the suspension?

desindol 4y ago

Never use anything made by google if you don’t have to. They don’t care and they don’t have a support team. Your only chance to get anything is by making enough noise that their PR team gets involved or by going to court.

mysterydip 4y ago
It doesn't seem to matter how many stories show up like this, there are people who will continue to do so for some reason.

jphsnsir 4y ago

Why would you use google for your domains? Domains are important(most of the time), I use a registrar which specializes in it. If a company does less than 50% of their revenue in domains, don't use it..

terpimost 4y ago
Which one is it? I recently tried to fond an alternative register and was very confused by the offering. Google Domains s product looks and works pretty good
- ratg13 4y ago
  Namecheap has been reliable for me and offers the most responsive support I've had from a registrar. Cloudflare is also a decent option if you just want a .com
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- kornhole 4y ago
  my current favorite is gandi.net. i still have some at namecheap and an anonymous one at njal.la.

ddevault 4y ago

I wish you the best of luck. I hope that everyone here will view this as an important lesson about relying on Google.

gabereiser 4y ago

I remember a few years back I worked for a startup that was all bright eyed for GCP. I warned them that GCP has a history of deplatforming and removing peoples clouds if they feel like it. They swore that Google would be a kind and just ruler. Weeks later, they were booted from GCP. Never, ever, trust, Google.

samwestdev 4y ago
What happened? Did they violate any ToS?
- tyingq 4y ago
  That really shouldn't matter though. In the real world, people make mistakes, people get hacked, rogue employees do things they aren't supposed to, Google makes mistakes (oops, wrong account), and so on. A support policy that just cuts off all contact and holds your data hostage doesn't make sense. If they want to arbitrarily zap customers, then they need to support some downgraded interface that lets you extract your data, move your domain, see some explanation for why you're being booted, etc.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  I don’t know the specifics. All I know is that one day it was gone and we had to go through hoops to get it back. We migrated to AWS within a month. Since I was more familiar with AWS, that’s the part I helped on.

mehrdada 4y ago

Simply unfortunate that one cannot rely on Google for critical stuff. The least one can do is compartmentalization across various Google account and keeping domain names, considering they are at the very root of the infrastructure chain, separate from other activities. I just [literally in the past hour] had to [unsuccessfully] deal with a Google Fi mess-up while traveling (I made the mistake of running their crappy app on the iPad, which forced me to go through some “activation” steps on first run even though SIM was already active, which in turn disabled my primary SIM and moved the primary line to iPad data SIM). I had to reactivate it on my phone using their app, by deleting and reinstalling, which eventually worked, but left the data SIM on iPad inactive. Support is of no help except to suggest shipping a new data SIM to my primary address, obviously of no help while traveling.

code51 4y ago
You cannot effectively "compartmentalize" when it comes to Google. It actively tries to resolve you into one person, most of the time it succeeds. Or worse, you are marked with a false positive.

prof-dr-ir 4y ago

Ehm I am very sorry and not the greatest fan of Google by a long shot, but... who are you? Why should we trust you? Again I am really sorry but I'm just missing street cred; I only see two new HN accounts and a Twitter account with 79 followers. Edit: in response to all the comments and downvotes: really, I would not be that hard to convince. How about a LinkedIn page? Glassdoor? An archived version of the site? A personal webpage? A cached Bing search result? Anything, really.

Barrin92 4y ago
> who are you? I suppose we'll never figure that out, because his domain is gone. Little bit cynical and circular isn't it, cull the 100 follower people, who will care, they only got 100 followers!
- zo1 4y ago
  And if this was a coordinated deplatforming, who knows how many properties of theirs went down simultaneously, including cache from various search engines. E.g. If they used their Gmail account for emails to all those services mentioned up in the thread. Your email is your identity and it's not owned by you atm.
croes 4y ago
Why shouldn't we? It's not like Google didn't do such things before.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  At least ~half the 'BigCo is being unreasonable' stories here have another side where the poster was doing something terrible (eg. sharing child porn on their google drive account), and then complaining when their account gets blocked for 'no reason'. The BigCo can't typically make any comment when this happens - merely say 'we have investigated and decided to uphold the ban', and then they look unreasonable. Sometimes the unreasonable thing is done by malware on the users computer/phone, so even the user isn't aware, but from BigCo's perspective it all looks the same. BigCo processes are still opaque, but often the outcomes aren't as unreasonable as they seem.

cmeacham98 4y ago

Look, I don't want to sound like I'm victim blaming: you are a victim here and Google shouldn't have done this. However, in the future, if losing your domain incurs "heavy losses by the minute", go with a provider where you can pay for real support, not $10/year on Google domains.

noam_compsci 4y ago
This is entirely fair. Neglecting infrastructure investment is a business choice.

samwillis 4y ago

I think there is something to be said for having redundant domains for backend apis for an app, with redundant dns. If one was to go down have the app fall back to the other. Not much help for a web app of e-commerce business though, domains are are one single point of failure that you can’t easily fix. But it’s one of those things that isn’t mission critical while building a business and so can easily be overlooked. I see redundancy in the backend, or at least a disaster recovery plan that covers single points of failure, the same as normal backup procedures that most of us already do.

dig1 4y ago

When you pay the company for some service and the only way to reach their support is via Twitter, hoping for the best, I'd run away from that company fast as possible. Someone once said, "you are never big enough for Google to notice you", meaning, you can't pay them enough so you can have dedicated 24/7 support by real humans. People should learn by now that Google's bread and butter is search and ads. Everything else is a second citizen to them.

johnywalks 4y ago
I've been avoiding any google product lock in for years now. These ban cases might be rare but i would never trust them enough to build my livelihood on it.
cft 4y ago
Is it safe to have an Android phone? What if they decide to deplatform your Google account associated with it. What about trusting your number to Google Fi? I have both and I am nervous.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account. Google Fi: Depends on your country's laws for how phone number transfers work.
  - signal11 4y ago
    > Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account. If you have apps, movies etc bought from Google Play — those are gone too. If you use a @gmail email address, you lose that too and you now have to tell people not use that any more.
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      Except for buying apps, none of these have anything to do with using Android.

radiojasper 4y ago

> incurring heavy losses by the minute. if that was true, you'd have your legal department fix it instead of posting a complaint on Twitter and then cross-posting it on HN to get more traction.

croes 4y ago
Heavy loss is subjective. Doesn't mean it's enough to afford a legal department. $100 is nothing to some but all to others.
priyesh2609 4y ago
I understand your confusion here, but not all heavy losses by the minute means monetary losses. Losing on client evaluations, SLAs etc that's what I meant here. But genuine thank you for playing a role in getting us a traction.

radiojasper 4y ago

The domain is still registered until 2023-02-23 but the WHOIS records got updated today [0] Expires On: 2023-02-23 Registered On: 2015-02-23 Updated On: 2022-09-11 [0] https://who.is/whois/lyearn.com https://who.is/whois/lyearn.com I would love to see what you were hosting on this website that made google suspend your domain like that.

riedel 4y ago
Probably not the same thing as in 2004. I would guess it is a plain trademark thing. We recently had to cease using a domain. https://web.archive.org/web/20041127043041/http://www.ylearn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041127043041/http://www.ylearn... Multimedia Knowledge is a new and exciting educational publishing company established to provide the most up-to-date, effective, educationally sound material for 21st Century K-12 students, teachers, and the educational community. The BioScope Initiative CD-ROMs have been developed at Purdue University by an outstanding group of teachers and educators and was funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the foremost authorities in science and education in America.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zhfliz 4y ago
  ylearn.com != lyearn.com

tyingq 4y ago

Yeah, Google is just a bad choice for domain registration, since they have that policy of just ghosting you for support. If you're going to use Google, stick to services where you can route around them if they decide they aren't going to talk to you.

terpimost 4y ago
Please give me too 3 alternatives
- thiht 4y ago
  Here’s a list of 4000 alternatives: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... My personal choices would be Namecheap, Porkbun, Gandi, AWS Route 53 and Cloudflare.
- lizardactivist 4y ago
  I don't have any at hand, but look for the registrars in your own country, and if none are good enough for you, look for registrars in the European Union. Do not use US American registrars at any cost, you will regret it eventually.

einpoklum 4y ago

(Semi-tongue-in-cheek:) If you can pin this on Google being racist against your ethnic group or whatever, you might be able to stir up enough of a scandal on social media to get Google's PR to notice. Not sure this is such a great course of action, but still probably with a better chance of success than waiting for Google to support you through regular channels.

lizardactivist 4y ago

I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of this. Imagine how many startups and great, growing ideas have been squashed because Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare etc. cut them away them in the early stages, and the news of it simply never reaches HN or whatever little corner of the internet we sit in.

prfssnl 4y ago

This is my weekly reminder to not use Google for anything essential.

hrbf 4y ago

There is a general business lesson here: don’t entrust your critical infrastructure to any provider that does not offer a direct line of communication.

moralestapia 4y ago

People here stating you shouldn't use Google for domain registration you're partly right, however, what about TLDs owned by them? I have several .app domains, so there's not really a choice there. One of those is taking off (getting lots of users/visitors) and every year they raise the price to renew it, there's nothing I can do about that as apparently they own the TLD and have the last word on it. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in their TsS there's a clause that allows them to take the domain away from me for whatever reason.

Ayesh 4y ago
Registry intervention isn't that common, unless it affects the domain name itself. I think the two most common encounters would be UDPR cases and government take down demands. I don't think any TLD owner will bend over backwards to protect the registrant in cases like this. They will just comply and move on. For Google, though, the worst I imagine is their TLD nameservers using their logs to rank your domains for search results.

nurettin 4y ago

counter-anecdote: rookie dev left keys in the open, cloud account got hacked, google detected suspicious activity, suspended the account immediately after, we appealed, they responded within the day and vaiwed the extra cost. It was a good day for us.

priyesh2609 4y ago

Edit: Google has now resolved the issue, and we're up again. Expedited help from Google. Thanks a lot! Reason mentioned being one of our customer's account was involved in phishing. We're checking this internally. To Community: Appreciate all your efforts in giving us the traction/momentum. It shows us that there are lots of helpful & caring people in the community, I would love to be of any help to other members in the community, to assist in anyway possible. Thanks & Regards

midislack 4y ago

Why do small startups even use cloud computing? Seems wasteful.