alt Hacker NewsGoogle suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time
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A few years ago google blocked my youtube red / premium account for spam even though the account was only used to watch videos. Not only did they wipe the account the wiped access to the payment page so I couldn't even cancel membership for months, dealing with robotic messages (you get to appeal every 3 weeks) all while being charged. Oh I also had Google One which promised in person support but they couldnt do shit because YT different team. I ended up cancelling the credit card. Earlier this year, I got a random message that my suspension was reversed and the original suspension was in error.
Just anedotally, I've had my wechat account blocked before and it took less than a day to talk to a person to get it sorted. At least PRC censorship has good customer service.
All these platforms go for scale. They can't have individualized relations with people and have the rentability of a drug lord, especially when said people aren’t part of some world-scale enterprise who provides a sizeable chunk of their revenue. If they catch one good person for every bad one they eliminate, it’s seen as an unfortunate side-effect, a necessary cost, and they’re fine with it.
Yesterday was a wise account(1), the week before was GitHub (2)
Companies are fiefdoms, they’re not democracies with a judicial system. If one of the automated sheriffs identifies you as a criminal, it doesn’t put you on trial, but directly sentences you to jail. Your process from there is never clear and it's anyone's guess to what the outcome will be.
1: https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar...
The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.
Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.
The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
This will probably become a major problem with the Gemini APIs in enough time.
A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
Android developer verification would end up just like this. Lots of people would be banned from developing for Android.
My AdSense account was suspended three times because I had an exclamation mark in my ad. I closed my account after that. I am certain Google still tracks my account as "potential fraud" to this day.
We had ours unexpectedly blocked and we were just using it for a "Login with Google" button. The only explanation was the vague "You did something against our terms and conditions." We hadn't done anything. Our use case is nothing beyond the "Login with Google" button.
We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account.
And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future.
I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
I wonder if this is a situation where the right course of action is to sue Google and/or push for stronger regulation around suspension of customer accounts?
For YEARS I have been "screaming at the sky" (pun somewhat intended) about, what later became know as, cloud services. Family, friends, and coworkers would laugh at my resistance to use Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. storage. Would tell me that I do not need a µSD card slot for my phone because these wonderful "free" services existed. Would mock me for continuing to purchase DVDs and CDs. I remember when Apple told me my @mac.com email address would be free forever. I feel that, as of late, I am being vindicated somewhat. With stories like this increasing. Stories of services eliminating the movies, games, music, books, storage they promised you would be around "forever", celebrities nude photos being hacked and put out there for everybody to see. Neither the cloud, and DEFINITELY not big business, is your friend at all. To them, you are just dollar signs until you aren't.
So, what happens to an account that is registered with said suspended email account and with a passkey-only login?
Does Google-synced passkeys on Google Password Manager still work even when your account is suspended?
Can't recover your accounts because you can't access your email, unless Google still allows existing email client access even when suspended but I'm not unfortunate enough to test this out.
A major downside of any service once it becomes too large is that the overall complexity introduces lower reliability. From Google's perspective perhaps each rule and feature makes sense, but from a customer perspective, there might be too much risk of who-knows-what issues coming up. I don't think this is limited to Google. I miss the older, less complicated versions of most bigtech services; Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc. Even looking at Vercel's project settings the other day I found myself thinking "hmm this is getting a bit unwieldy."
Also beware of having the owner for your Google Workspace be that of an employee who no longer works there. I was never able to fulfill all the "requirements" of Google support to get the Workspace back, despite the fact that it was linked to our domain... and we couldn't register a new Google Workspace to that domain. Ok, Google, I guess we just won't use your products, and we lose access to all our mail and files?
To me it sounds like you're a weird business model for GCP and you keep being hit by tooling designed to block bad use cases that come across this uncommon use case.
That might just be me though.
I submitted my app to App Store Connect for Apple and Google Play Store. After a few reviews on Apple my app was approved after a week or so. On Google, I got a couple rejections. I addressed the concerns resubmitted. Got another rejection without much detail, but changed a couple things and submitted again. App suspended... without any explanation why.
You're going to look like an attacker to google for almost any model of review of access. You're in a niche role which would demand they build systems to take account of you. I can understand why a monolith has back pressure towards that cost and consequence.
Sucks.
Not related to this particular reason for suspension, but I had a friend who's GCP account got put on pause a few weeks into his project because his payment method was flagged for suspicious behavior. This friend had an incident of stolen identity in the past 24 months which caused a lot of issues and basically any CC linked to him seemed to be problematic for GCP. Swapped CC linked to the account to his business partner and fixed everything.
Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.
Sometimes I think what's the worst it could happen if Google decided to delete my main personal account that I use for everything: banking, utilities...
I guess it would a hassle to go to the bank but loosing some images or old emails wouldn't be so catastrophic TBH. Maybe being somewhat nihilistic/minimalist I think that it all will still be lost when I die, so why trying to grasp those things? In some sense it's kind of liberating not depending too much on these kind of things.
No people to interact with. Only AI and automated systems. Engineers/PMs/leaders/etc are incentivized to develop something new (more bonus, RSU, promotions) and move on. Nobody gets rewarded to improve things already developed.
The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital: https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/the-great-decoupling-of-labor-... explains this with numbers: Alphabet required 76k employees to get to their first $100 Billion. Their most recent incremental $100 Billion? Just 11,000! (assuming they add another 3k employees in 4Q’25)
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...
This is very similar to how DoIT manage their client projects. I needed to add one of their service accounts to my organization's IAM policy so they could have complete visibility over all resources for monitoring / cost reporting purposes. The only potential difference being that DoIT is a Google Cloud Premier Partner™
It might be a case where illegal / scam / anything of that type were using the SSLMate service to issue and deploy those certificates, whereas some aspects of this process (DNS / HTTP / Mail) verification or similar were processed directly on the GCP.
I could not get from the OP what really happened and what was the claim / explanation from Google side.
I don't use Google cloud but the seven step OIDC configuration process is the kind of thing that can be scripted quite easily in Azure, e.g. using the az CLI tool. When a step creates a new object the command can return its ID so you can save it in a variable and use it in a subsequent step.
If Google has something similar this seems preferable to the alternatives.
It's important to keep in mind that many (if not most) people ad-blocking google ads do so because of the fear of malware (usually from youtube).
So to Google, killing accounts of malicious actors is a primary concern, and obviously you can wield a lot of damage to people through google's services if unchecked. And even with checks, every bad actor wears the mask of innocence when appealing.
So this puts Google in a rather intractable position. Without numbers it's hard to say whether they are leaning to hard towards stopping fraud (many false positives), or too hard towards giving accounts freedom (high levels of malware served).
Honestly, many companies are suicidal to put "everything" in the hand of AWS or Google, thousand of accounts are banned everyday, a simple accidental VPN/Tor connection can lead to losing everything (at least temporarily) and their rules aren't transparent so we can't really anticipate it.
There's a reason Google has a reputation of "Don't use it for anything that you can't afford to have disappear with no notice or recourse."
You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.
As certain youtuber says - go where you're treated best.
Google ain't it.
The google docs they point to say
> You can access data from your users' Google Cloud projects by creating a service account to represent your service, and then having your customers grant that service account appropriate access to their cloud data using IAM policies. Note that you might want to create a service account per customer if you need to avoid confused deputy problems.
If you look at most SaaS services, they rarely use a service account per customer. IMO it's no different than any part of your own services where you need to handle multiple customers. Creating multiple service accounts is just overhead.
The problem is that they manage customers through automation. If the system flags you, you’re out. By using their products, you accept the risk of being cut off.
This is why using Google Fi Wirelessis a really bad idea since you can lose your phone at any time for no reason.
This pattern is a big part of why Google is a poor company to buy infrastructure from. They are horrible at customer support, and have made it clear over the years that they have no intention of changing that. That's simply unacceptable for production infrastructure.
Until people stop building applications with hard dependencies on "other people's computers" this is going to keep happening.
So, we all know Google is pure Evil - pure greed. But people said this in the past too: don't become dependent on these giant mega-corporations, be it Google, Amazon/AWS and so forth. The cake is a lie - this is another example we can add to the "never trust Google" meme.
did you pay for any ads to google? otherwise no wonder you get suspended
I'll tell you the problem with Google (in my experience). They've moved to Big Company cash cow mode. They even use SAP Ariba ... which dictates that their teams are silo'd and ultra rigid ... and so dealing with them is a nightmare.
N=1
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice..
> Clearly, I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases. Google has built a complex, unreliable system
You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough?
I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services.
Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox.
Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.
GCP is a terrible idea for anything important unless you're big enough to have an executive team and yours knows theirs - was the quote I heard somewhere but am struggling to attribute.
[flagged]
Maybe it’s time to ditch google cloud?
After the third occurrence of this i’d blame this on you, honestly.
If you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google.
They got used to ads money, where they control the entire board. They never got good in other types of businesses. Especially not in customer service.
People consider google as a trusted partner whereas it is designed as a retail factory. Mass serving of millions and protectioms whose false positives can destroy the lives of thousands. Still they are statistically correct. Nuking everything instead of the offending service? Convenient fir them. Unavailable support reps? Convenient for them? Meaningless automated answers? Convenient for them. Its not a solid system that has defects, it was designed that way. Their unavailability and abrupt cruelty does not serve as cost optimisation, it serves as liability optimisation.