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.

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!

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

It would dramatically improve the service.

Forever.

Good luck to you

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

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

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

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

I guess not?

>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?

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.