Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

I had my GCP quota algorithmically set to 0 after spending 6 months working with them to launch a startup.

I went through a ton of hoops to get approval for our quota. We sent them system diagrams, code samples, financial reports, growth predictions, etc. It was months of back and forth. I'll also add that it was very annoying because they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48 hours but their responses take 1-3 weeks. In any case, after 6 months, they eventually approved us for our quota, we launched, and they shut us down to 0 quota across all services the instant our production app got traffic.

We contacted them again asking for help. We never got any human response. We got a boiler plate template a few times, but that was it.

I will never ever ever again use a cloud service where I can't guarantee that I can get good customer service. Unfortunately for a small business that means no big clouds like AWS, GCP, etc.

Yes, I am bitter.

> I am a CS researcher at UC Berkeley. This has seriously impacted my work.

I would try to get help from your department. Somewhere within CS and CS-adjacent departments at Berkeley there’s likely to be someone with an official or unofficial connection to Google that can get you in touch with a human to at least clarify the situation.

So much information is missing from this.

What Google account? Is it personal Gmail? Or your academic account? Are you using this for personal reasons or professional or commercial reasons? What kind of payment method is attached? What was your level of usage? Any idea why you were suspended initially?

Because it could be that Google is reviewing your appeal and simply shadow-denying it, and you haven't provided the right information to make it look legit. E.g. if they think you're a spammer or mining crypto or they think you're creating additional free accounts to use free credits, they're obviously not going to tell you what makes them think that.

But if this is for university-related work, and your university purchases IT+cloud services from Google (as they probably do), talk to your IT department so they can get you in touch with their institution-level support. Obviously, for the attached Google sales rep, the last thing they want is a CS researcher losing access to GCP.

> I am a CS researcher at UC Berkeley. This has seriously impacted my work.

Can I suggest a topic for your next research? "Cloud exascalers and their negative impact on the society"

Unless you know someone at Google with a little swagger to get things done you’re shit out of luck.

Did you tweet them - https://x.com/googlecloud?

If it's so important, maybe talk with a lawyer.

It's gone. No human will ever respond to you. That's how these companies operate. From here, you realistically have two options.

1. Forget the account and move on. You could create a new one, but nobody can tell how long it would take before that gets suspended as well.

2. If the suspension has a tangible negative impact on your profession, hire a lawyer and get proper legal advice.

Most important of all, let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues. It is a terrible idea to let any critical part of your life depend on unregulated industries that can wipe out someone's livelihood at the whim of machine learning systems. Learn this lesson and pass it on to everyone you know.

As an individual, you are nobody to Google and you have no leverage. It is reckless to build your livelihood or profession around their platforms. If you were a company, your team could speak to an account manager and negotiate. As an individual, your only real leverage is legal action.

Stories like this appear every month. I don't know how many more it will take before it becomes best practice not to depend on these utterly abominable rackets for anything critical.

Cloud lock-in is real and requires a lot of forethought to avoid or at least mitigate. on the LLM side I have pushed my last two companies to always have at least 3 vendors for hosting and a system to fail over instantly or even load balance based on different criteria. It has paid massive dividends. I wish that philosophy was easier to implement at the cloud level for all services.

anything that has to do with google avoid at major cost

or have an alternative ready

for serious work -- don't use google & don't use google devices either

How come your business or research are so tied to GCP? What about other providers?

UC Berkeley gets much of its IT infrastructure from Google in a big and expensive contract. Perhaps some of the campus staff could try to negotiate on your behalf?

Plenty of GCP, AWS and Azure experiences in this thread, but any Cloudflare experiences?

This is such a repetitious issue that I wonder why there has been no class action suits so far?

I think documenting these cases somewhere, and targeting not just Alphabet but all the other "we're too big to support little people like you" companies would be a good idea. I don't think the pay out would be significant, but the punitive impact might change things.

One of the many reasons I continue to degoogle and remove that garbage from my life wherever I can. So many cases like this.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. - Job 1:21

Xbox & Discord are the only 2 services I’ve seen handle bans with adequate transparency (yes there is still room to improve). Both offer a ban status tab ranging from hand-slap to giga-banned , allowing you to have some level of warning before being booted.

Given how dependent we all are on these services: we run our businesses and our lives, it’s despicable that more due process and transparency is not offered for shadow and proper bans like this.

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