We are facing completely hopeless situation where no one is providing us any answers or providing support for PAID service.
Can anyone help or provide any clues on how we can talk to actual support team?
Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately?
Google rarely shuts down Gsuite domains without a good reason. If they really aren't telling you the reason - it is abuse related.
(Former Googler, opinions are my own, etc etc)
It sounds like they've already contacted support. They said "Google support is refusing to let us know what happened" and "no one is providing us any answers or providing support".
It's amazing that Google doesn't get sued in a case like this, regardless of what's in the ToS.
If one of my employees did something bad, I would want warnings and ultimately a "hey, since your employees cannot behave, we're shutting your account as of <date> and have limited <functions> until then so you can migrate your company to another service.
This sort of binary response is why I will never commit to Google, and am increasingly evaluate the likelihood of ban when selecting cloud services.
Particularly since these bans are immediate, summary, and often based on algos, not humans.
...and this isn't just unfounded fear. We've had our Google My Business listings suspended when we had issues with our 2FA/recovery details. That was 4 months ago, and support also said they could do nothing, and My Business support never responded.
> Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately?
Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? I know, some of those apps are crap, but banning an entire org because of that?
Good to know that even paying customers are treated by Google as the product
I won't get in to specifics, but the first few times the user will get spanked. If you keep reenabling accounts that send spam, eventually the domain as a whole gets spanked.
It's not your mailbox with Google.
If it is indeed abuse related (whether there was any abuse or Google's algorithm just decided there was some abuse) then telling the abuser what got them banned is counterproductive from Google's PoV. Same reason reddit does vote fudging.
Google drive is hard as the only way is to setup continuous Google takeout's or use a third party service for backups which the last time I looked several years ago.
If my comment helped one iota to make backups more likely next time, I did good.
For the rest, you're completely right. Everything possible should've been backed up. It just has nagged me that a real backup isn't possible, and it has bitten me in the past (corrupted drawing, which corrupted related documents as well). Since then, I have only used the Google sheets/documents/etc. for throwaways and drafts.
If you have critical data that can cost your company that you can't backup, your're living a risky life. Hopefully they've checked with their colleagues that those agree with living that risky life.
When someone first said that to me I was 100% sure they were joking. Then I realized they weren’t joking at all.
Like does this give you a sense of superiority?
I could have said: Been there bought the T-shirt and I feel your pain. Which would be true. The person would have not felt better in any way because the data is gone, and would not have learned something either.
Does the person feel worse because of my comment? Don't think so. Either he already new and agrees with 'Yes, d* it should have done that, you're right' - what I felt someone said this to me - or he learned something. Perhaps if getting kicked hard enough he will not skip backups next time.
Does he feel bad? Sure.
Does anyone think about the people who he dragged down with him because he didn't have backups which would have been something he is paid for but didn't - do risking the jobs of everyone around him.
When consulting the FIRST thing I ask:
DO YOU HAVE BACKUPS FOR YOUR AWS/GOOGLE/... DATA?
And if not do it now - although the usually answer is: This is the cloud I don't need backups because they backup the data/redundancy/S3/... What about someone deleting it? By accident or itention? What about you getting sued by A/G/MS/...? What if they kick you of like XXX (Parler, ...)?
Most do backups to a another provider the same day.
Not having backups if you're the one responsible is not the same as getting cancer or being hit by a car. It's you've screwed up very badly endangering many other people.
I just cannot recommend anyone seriously use GSuite or GCP until Google starts treating customers better.
Wonder when people will realize that they should not rely on Google (or Facebook) (or Apple) for doing business.
The situation is getting worse, not better. :(
https://hackaday.com/2020/10/21/google-meddling-with-urls-in...
FWIW, Microsoft have had a similar feature long before Google:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/offi...
You get things like issues with a user not having visiblity of items in a folder, and support ask you to check all folders shared with the user to see how many are affected. There are tens of thousands of these, so this is obviously impractical.
I had an issue with their "eventually consistent" admin interface not showing whether a user was part of a group, and their response was to wait 24 hours to see if they have been sucessfully added to it, or to email the entire group and ask the user to check whether they got the test email.
We had a Google Sheets file that, for whatever reason, was not able to be opened. Months later, the issue is unresolved. If we didn't have daily backups that use the API to make a copy, exporting Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files as MS Office documents, using a thrd-party service, we would have just effectively lost this data.
It is clear that Google does not treat this as a business class product, and it hurts to business users.
It is getting worse and worse IMHO, while the MS competition is getting better and better. It is only a matter of time until we switch I think, and I would strongly caution anyone against adopting it, especially if you plan to use it as the primary file sharing method for more than 10 users. For us, the thing making it hard to move is that our data on Google Drive is a mess. We haven't been using Team Drives, because we have been using Google Drive since before they were a thing, so have complicated nested permissions, meaning we can't simply move things to Team Drives. If you have used it for as long as we have, when there was no way to prevent users from doing this, and didn't have policies about how it was used to prevent this (whiuch we didn't, we started using it before I joined the company) I don't see how you can have avoided this.
I'm not sure how GCP compares, but I have been pretty disappointed by how slow they have been to support recent versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL in their hosted DB service. We use AWS mostly, and, while there are things about GCP that look nice, they seem to fail to do the basics that would not be at all hard for them to do, and it looks like they don't take it seriously as a product either really. It is sad really, given that there really needs to be more competition for AWS and Azure IMHO.
Please make sure to include the following information: - Domain - Your Domain Admin's Email - Any Google contacts that you're supposed to have
I'll do my best to have one of the Workspace agents reach out. I work closely with them, so should be pretty easy. :+1:
Generally, I've seen issue like this where a bad Apps Extension is added or various other external, but generraly preventable things happen.
This can literally kill the company outright.
We are a GSUITE company, and these stories give me nightmares. If one of my employees violated the ToS, even repeatedly, I expect to be told "Get off our system. We're giving you x days to move elsewhere, and have restricted <functions> until such time".
An immediate and total shutdown with literally NO response from Support is so drastic that it would trigger a lawsuit if it were any other company.
The only reason it doesn't in these cases is because it's David vs Goliath, and the victim company is already too dead and broke to sue.
Hopefully some lawyers will file a class action against Google - I have a Google My Business account that was suspended without cause (no abuse) with zero response from support.
GSUITE banning us would put us out of business, and I worry about this more than I should have to.
It may be that I am out of touch with the other HN users on this one, but "$megacorp does something that on purpose/accidentally blocks my service" doesn't surprise me at all. That the megacorp is legally in the right on their own turf is even less unsurprising and not the point. There is a price to not running your own infrastructure and this price becomes tangible when something like this happens for whatever reason.
Edited: I have his Google email but I’m not sure if I can post it here. Email me instead at lawgimenez@hey.com
The hype by dhh was some next level stuff, but is the service actually good and usable?
At some point, we need to recognize this for what it is - unregulated monopolies having no accountability.
I'm wondering whether there are legal actions that people can take. Many years ago, I was having a problem with Anthem "losing" my insurance claims. Eventually, I got sufficiently frustrated and filed a complaint with the California Attorney General. Shortly after that, I got a long letter of apology, a promise to open an internal investigation, and most importantly, finally got my insurance claims processed.
Insurance companies have unique regulatory requirements specifically because they used to do what Google does now: ghosting paid-up customers. In their case, many insurance companies welcomed regulation to maintain a level playing field. It would otherwise become too easy for some to collect premiums but not pay out obligations, and thereby be able to undercut more honest companies. But for this to work, state Attorneys General need to take enforcement seriously, and resist capture. California's Attorney General is elected, which helps there.
https://www.businessnhmagazine.com/article/soldati-wins-unan...
You might have similar options?
I don't think I'm the only business owner who is wary of using GCP for anything, as it vastly increases the surface area of unintentional or malicious actions that could make our Google Workspace and all our data in it go poof with no recourse.
Being as google less as possible nowadays is just common sense.
We are recruitment firm.
Domain - ton80talents.com Email - admin@ton80talents.com/ resume@ton80talents.com
We are also in touch with one of the local provider (basically reseller) from whom we bought this Gsuite access.
takeout.google.com should work even when the accounts is banned.
