11 ms·

My Google Workspace account suspension

369 points by zenincognito 6mo ago

pluc 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
  Excreting power. What an awesome mental image. “Exerting” would be more correct I guess but less fun.
  - neom 6mo 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.
    - Loughla 6mo ago
      Hey do you have certain fonts that are better? I was working with a dyslexic student last week trying to find fonts that work better for his online classes. All the research pointed towards a handful that didn't seem to really improve processing for the student.
      - neom 6mo ago
        They tried all sorts with me in school, I seem to recall it's related to trying to add shadow to hint to the brain the direction the letter should be etc. I found it more annoying than helpful. Probably a very unpopular opinion but I think teaching someone with dyslexia to read and write neurotypically is probably unhelpful and finding audio visual learning methods is a considerably better way to have them retain knowledge. I think you can get to a basic level of competency but speed and recall, at least with me, never really came. One thing I found once that was cool was an app that present each word at a time only in the center of the screen, but it felt extremely mechanical I was so focused on the words once I was done there was basically no meaning left if that makes sense. I'm autistic with dyscalculia also, FWIW. I mostly think in sounds, pictures and movies, for whatever reason my brain doesn't have a great framework for symbols that don't have those things inherently attached to them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - justinclift 6mo ago
        Was this one of the font's they tried? https://opendyslexic.org https://opendyslexic.org
- amelius 6mo ago
  Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.
  - dotandgtfo 6mo ago
    This is one of the goals of the digital services act.
    - amelius 6mo ago
      The EU isn't as bad as some Americans want to believe.
      - ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
        They aren't perfect but at least they try. All our government does is bomb brown people and cut taxes for the wealthy.
      - brookst 6mo ago
        The EU’s heart is in the right place, which can only rarely be said of the US. But the EU’s approach is often backwards. When product managers have to ask the government if it’s ok to ship a feature, something is wrong. When the government responds that it can’t say in advance, you’ll just have to ship and see if you get fined, something is really seriously broken.
        amelius 6mo ago
        If a company is about to produce millions of physical products, I think it is quite ok if they first check with the government to see if that is a good idea. Same with social media features that are rolled out to millions of users.
        warkdarrior 6mo ago
        This is about Digital Services Act, not physical products.
- jjav 6mo 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.
  - cube00 6mo 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.
    - nottorp 6mo ago
      > needs to phone their internal fraud dept Except the bank teller has already authenticated you and internal fraud will pick up the phone...
    - jjav 6mo ago
      > Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket. That's not how it works at banks nor phone vendors. (Although, even being able to open a ticket would be 100% better than the black hole of nothingness that is google support.) When you go to a bank with access issues (something I've done somewhat regularly because I manage accounts for various family members who no longer can) you meet with someone who can authenticate you, and that employee has direct access to talk to their risk and fraud departments so they can sort out any issues while you're sitting there next to them. There needs to be a law that any cloud service with a non-trivial userbase must have a similarly staffed support center reasonably accessible to all citizens.
      - cube00 6mo ago
        > being able to open a ticket would be 100% better Not with Google, I've had a ticket open for five months counting.
shevy-java 6mo 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 6mo ago
  Google Workspace isn't free, it is a paid for plan.
- zenincognito 6mo ago
  its $13 per month for a basic plan.
- izacus 6mo ago
  What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you shitty to the victim?
  - techteach00 6mo 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.
    - skeeter2020 6mo ago
      1. they're wrong in their basic understanding; this is not a free product 2. the response is glib and lacks any empathy 3. there's no suggestions of possible action or resolution path 4. it is all opinion and low value / low effort So even if it's an "honest and accurate diagnosis" that you agree with, it's not helpful, valuable or even comforting. We can do better.
    - walterbell 6mo ago
      What's a good alternative to Google Workspace for SMB customers?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
pbowyer 6mo ago
Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ 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.
- ValentineC 6mo 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.
  - mjlee 6mo 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.
    - locao 6mo ago
      It depends on what you call "non-trivial". I found answers on how to circumvent dumb macos bugs on Apple forums at least twice in the last 6 months. One related to displays, I was about to return a new USB-C monitor which wouldn't turn on. A silly issue, but it's a bug on my book, I wouldn't find the answer on the docs.
      - mjlee 6mo ago
samlinnfer 6mo 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 6mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
  - faidit 6mo 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
    - prerok 6mo ago
      There's a long queue up that mountain, though.
  - skeeter2020 6mo 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.
    - 6mo ago
pzmarzly 6mo 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?
- gchamonlive 6mo ago
  There's always keycloak you can rollout yourself. It's not trivial but it's quite doable.
  - walterbell 6mo ago
    Thanks for the pointer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354 edit: looks like there are affordable managed hosting providers for keycloak.
    - gchamonlive 6mo ago
      I was a long time k8s skeptical, but I think it's solid now. If there's good support for keycloak for k8s with support for backups I wouldn't think twice. Not sure the state of keycloak now, but it was a lot of work to manage keycloak configs with the IaC pipeline. That could have gotten better now, but I think having access to the data is important because migration might not be trivial if for instance a provider starts acting up.
  - watusername 6mo 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 https://github.com/kanidm/kanidm
protimewaster 6mo 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.
- HumanOstrich 6mo 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 6mo 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.
bambushu 6mo ago
[flagged]
bookofjoe 6mo 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 6mo 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
  - bookofjoe 6mo ago
    You are correct. I agree 100%. It's easy to be great when it's on a tiny scale.
    - blueboo 6mo ago
      Billions in profit may unblock scaling customer support beyond scrappy startup minimums However (and I loathe this logic) if you can get the marketplace to accept that minimal level, and the brand harm is inconsequential, why not pocket the savings
      - anjel 6mo ago
        Those are not matter-of-fact saving, but rather significant savings
      - justinclift 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
vednig 6mo 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 https://getcloud.doshare.me
fortran77 6mo 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 6mo 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.
0xpgm 6mo 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 6mo 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
cj 6mo 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.
- ValentineC 6mo 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 6mo 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.
    - ValentineC 6mo ago
      That's what I've been doing. It doesn't address this thread's concern that a single Super Admin could be locked out with no recourse, since Google's customer support is horrendously bad.
- e40 6mo 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.
r1ch 6mo 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.
- qingcharles 6mo 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.
  - justinclift 6mo 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 6mo 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.
  - subscribed 6mo 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.
Jimmc414 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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-alternative-dispute-resolution-clauses-were-used-against-them/ https://www.mbelr.org/mass-arbitration-how-ubers-own-alterna...
welder 6mo 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 6mo ago
this is actually scary as fuck I thought with Workspace you'd actually be spared from this kind of BS I guess not?
- Lihh27 6mo 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 6mo 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.
jimbocyou 6mo 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.
- Hackbraten 6mo 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.
  - jimbocyou 6mo 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.
    - Hackbraten 6mo ago
      > The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider. Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country they're in? How do you move to another country without changing cellular providers at the same time?
      - jimbocyou 6mo ago
        Of course you can keep your provider. It's called roaming, per OP story: "I am travelling to the UK and did not want to have *roaming* on my Australian phone." For cheaper rates than roaming, typically you install a secondary eSIM for the country you're traveling. 99% modern phones support dual SIM for this reason
hayatofujihara 6mo ago
Tough situation. A good reminder to set up a backup recovery method before removing the existing one, especially when traveling.
e40 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
    To me, the action is the juice.
myultidevhq 6mo 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?
827a 6mo 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 6mo 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.
jeffbee 6mo ago
If you wanted to intentionally trigger every account abuse system at Google, follow this guy's script.
- sfmike 6mo ago
  people who travel shouldn't trigger account abuse
  - jeffbee 6mo 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.
- herewulf 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
  - drcongo 6mo 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.
    - mijowi 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - mkl 6mo ago
      ZeroTier. It works well for me. I chose it over Tailscale because it doesn't require a third party for login.
  - ratorx 6mo 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.
alejandrosplitt 6mo ago
[dead]
lukeschlather 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
Thanks for the great reminder to detangle myself from Google.
nerdsfeed 6mo ago
[dead]
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
  - 6mo ago
nerdsfeed 6mo ago
[dead]
bradley13 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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-identity-in-person/ https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-...
- wvenable 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
drnick1 6mo 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.
zenincognito 6mo ago
Update: A kind stranger from Google reached out and this is now resolved. Thank you HN for helping me through this.
- entrox 6mo 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 6mo 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...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tsoukase 6mo 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 6mo ago
> 3) Removed recovery phone Never put your phone in there in the first place. You can actually skip that step.
kkfx 6mo ago
It's simply about time to own your digital life instead of being slave of someone else.
econ 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.

369 points by zenincognito 6mo ago

pluc 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
Excreting power. What an awesome mental image. “Exerting” would be more correct I guess but less fun.
- neom 6mo 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.
  - Loughla 6mo ago
    Hey do you have certain fonts that are better? I was working with a dyslexic student last week trying to find fonts that work better for his online classes. All the research pointed towards a handful that didn't seem to really improve processing for the student.
    - neom 6mo ago
      They tried all sorts with me in school, I seem to recall it's related to trying to add shadow to hint to the brain the direction the letter should be etc. I found it more annoying than helpful. Probably a very unpopular opinion but I think teaching someone with dyslexia to read and write neurotypically is probably unhelpful and finding audio visual learning methods is a considerably better way to have them retain knowledge. I think you can get to a basic level of competency but speed and recall, at least with me, never really came. One thing I found once that was cool was an app that present each word at a time only in the center of the screen, but it felt extremely mechanical I was so focused on the words once I was done there was basically no meaning left if that makes sense. I'm autistic with dyscalculia also, FWIW. I mostly think in sounds, pictures and movies, for whatever reason my brain doesn't have a great framework for symbols that don't have those things inherently attached to them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - justinclift 6mo ago
      Was this one of the font's they tried? https://opendyslexic.org https://opendyslexic.org
amelius 6mo ago
Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.
- dotandgtfo 6mo ago
  This is one of the goals of the digital services act.
  - amelius 6mo ago
    The EU isn't as bad as some Americans want to believe.
    - ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
      They aren't perfect but at least they try. All our government does is bomb brown people and cut taxes for the wealthy.
    - brookst 6mo ago
      The EU’s heart is in the right place, which can only rarely be said of the US. But the EU’s approach is often backwards. When product managers have to ask the government if it’s ok to ship a feature, something is wrong. When the government responds that it can’t say in advance, you’ll just have to ship and see if you get fined, something is really seriously broken.
      - amelius 6mo ago
        If a company is about to produce millions of physical products, I think it is quite ok if they first check with the government to see if that is a good idea. Same with social media features that are rolled out to millions of users.
        warkdarrior 6mo ago
        This is about Digital Services Act, not physical products.
jjav 6mo 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.
- cube00 6mo 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.
  - nottorp 6mo ago
    > needs to phone their internal fraud dept Except the bank teller has already authenticated you and internal fraud will pick up the phone...
  - jjav 6mo ago
    > Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket. That's not how it works at banks nor phone vendors. (Although, even being able to open a ticket would be 100% better than the black hole of nothingness that is google support.) When you go to a bank with access issues (something I've done somewhat regularly because I manage accounts for various family members who no longer can) you meet with someone who can authenticate you, and that employee has direct access to talk to their risk and fraud departments so they can sort out any issues while you're sitting there next to them. There needs to be a law that any cloud service with a non-trivial userbase must have a similarly staffed support center reasonably accessible to all citizens.
    - cube00 6mo ago
      > being able to open a ticket would be 100% better Not with Google, I've had a ticket open for five months counting.

shevy-java 6mo 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 6mo ago
Google Workspace isn't free, it is a paid for plan.
zenincognito 6mo ago
its $13 per month for a basic plan.
izacus 6mo ago
What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you shitty to the victim?
- techteach00 6mo 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.
  - skeeter2020 6mo ago
    1. they're wrong in their basic understanding; this is not a free product 2. the response is glib and lacks any empathy 3. there's no suggestions of possible action or resolution path 4. it is all opinion and low value / low effort So even if it's an "honest and accurate diagnosis" that you agree with, it's not helpful, valuable or even comforting. We can do better.
  - walterbell 6mo ago
    What's a good alternative to Google Workspace for SMB customers?

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

pbowyer 6mo ago

Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ 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.

ValentineC 6mo 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.
- mjlee 6mo 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.
  - locao 6mo ago
    It depends on what you call "non-trivial". I found answers on how to circumvent dumb macos bugs on Apple forums at least twice in the last 6 months. One related to displays, I was about to return a new USB-C monitor which wouldn't turn on. A silly issue, but it's a bug on my book, I wouldn't find the answer on the docs.
    - mjlee 6mo ago

samlinnfer 6mo 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 6mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
- faidit 6mo 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
  - prerok 6mo ago
    There's a long queue up that mountain, though.
- skeeter2020 6mo 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.
  - 6mo ago

pzmarzly 6mo 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?

gchamonlive 6mo ago
There's always keycloak you can rollout yourself. It's not trivial but it's quite doable.
- walterbell 6mo ago
  Thanks for the pointer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354 edit: looks like there are affordable managed hosting providers for keycloak.
  - gchamonlive 6mo ago
    I was a long time k8s skeptical, but I think it's solid now. If there's good support for keycloak for k8s with support for backups I wouldn't think twice. Not sure the state of keycloak now, but it was a lot of work to manage keycloak configs with the IaC pipeline. That could have gotten better now, but I think having access to the data is important because migration might not be trivial if for instance a provider starts acting up.
- watusername 6mo 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 https://github.com/kanidm/kanidm

protimewaster 6mo 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.

HumanOstrich 6mo 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 6mo 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.

bambushu 6mo ago

[flagged]

bookofjoe 6mo 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 6mo 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
- bookofjoe 6mo ago
  You are correct. I agree 100%. It's easy to be great when it's on a tiny scale.
  - blueboo 6mo ago
    Billions in profit may unblock scaling customer support beyond scrappy startup minimums However (and I loathe this logic) if you can get the marketplace to accept that minimal level, and the brand harm is inconsequential, why not pocket the savings
    - anjel 6mo ago
      Those are not matter-of-fact saving, but rather significant savings
    - justinclift 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

vednig 6mo 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 https://getcloud.doshare.me

fortran77 6mo 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 6mo 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.

0xpgm 6mo 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 6mo 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

cj 6mo 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.

ValentineC 6mo 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 6mo 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.
  - ValentineC 6mo ago
    That's what I've been doing. It doesn't address this thread's concern that a single Super Admin could be locked out with no recourse, since Google's customer support is horrendously bad.
e40 6mo 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.

r1ch 6mo 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.

qingcharles 6mo 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.
- justinclift 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- subscribed 6mo 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.

Jimmc414 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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-alternative-dispute-resolution-clauses-were-used-against-them/ https://www.mbelr.org/mass-arbitration-how-ubers-own-alterna...

welder 6mo 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 6mo ago

this is actually scary as fuck I thought with Workspace you'd actually be spared from this kind of BS I guess not?

Lihh27 6mo 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 6mo 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.

jimbocyou 6mo 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.

Hackbraten 6mo 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.
- jimbocyou 6mo 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.
  - Hackbraten 6mo ago
    > The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery phone number, country, cellular provider. Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country they're in? How do you move to another country without changing cellular providers at the same time?
    - jimbocyou 6mo ago
      Of course you can keep your provider. It's called roaming, per OP story: "I am travelling to the UK and did not want to have *roaming* on my Australian phone." For cheaper rates than roaming, typically you install a secondary eSIM for the country you're traveling. 99% modern phones support dual SIM for this reason

hayatofujihara 6mo ago

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

e40 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
  To me, the action is the juice.

myultidevhq 6mo 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?

827a 6mo 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 6mo 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.

jeffbee 6mo ago

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

sfmike 6mo ago
people who travel shouldn't trigger account abuse
- jeffbee 6mo 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.
herewulf 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
- drcongo 6mo 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.
  - mijowi 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - mkl 6mo ago
    ZeroTier. It works well for me. I chose it over Tailscale because it doesn't require a third party for login.
- ratorx 6mo 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.

alejandrosplitt 6mo ago

[dead]

lukeschlather 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago

Thanks for the great reminder to detangle myself from Google.

nerdsfeed 6mo ago

[dead]

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- 6mo ago

nerdsfeed 6mo ago

[dead]

bradley13 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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-identity-in-person/ https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-...
wvenable 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.

drnick1 6mo 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.

zenincognito 6mo ago

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

entrox 6mo 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 6mo 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...

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

tsoukase 6mo 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 6mo ago

> 3) Removed recovery phone Never put your phone in there in the first place. You can actually skip that step.

kkfx 6mo ago

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

econ 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.