My Google Workspace account suspension • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#191

Post by ctippett » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

bookofjoe wrote: post #24

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…

It was only a few years ago that they offered all of their Stadia subscribers a full refund for every dollar they ever spent on the platform. By this point their reputation for customer service was well and truly known, but colour me surprised when I received a not insignificant sum credited to my bank account from Google.

I saw it mentioned in a comment elsewhere in this thread, but the level of service you get really seems dependant on which pocket of Google is responsible for the product you happen to be using. Unfortunately Workspace is a giant pocket with many billions of users with suboptimal and/or perpetually exhausted support.

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#192

Post by glenpierce » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #156

suzzer99 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps. The fun part is both FB and Google started blocking Selenium and any other automated agents from logging in. So basically there's no way to run end to end tests that confirm the login flows using FB or Google, which have wrinkles that our normal login doesn't hit.

> We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps. This has the nefarious side effect of allowing Google or Facebook to track people across the Internet and apps. Webmasters like you are, often for no imperative reason, complicit of this by providing such login options.

This is an issue that regulators need to address. Asking small businesses to forego the significant impact on their business of not implementing common features that users demand is not a good solution to public policy failures.

I don’t know what the exact revenue/growth difference is, but if my paycheque depended upon getting more users to sign up, I don’t think I could justify making it into a political stance when Google isn’t going to notice my tiny boycott.

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#193

Post by latchkey » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

> 3) Removed recovery phone

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

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#194

Post by entrox » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

zenincognito wrote: post #159

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

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.

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#195

Post by kkfx » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

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

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#196

Post by 827a » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

Ferret7446 wrote: post #181

827a wrote: post #73

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…

> 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. I assume that's just because they need to set a cookie on the YouTube domain in case you visit YouTube later on the workspace account, a…

If the youtube.com 302 failed to itself 302 back to the next destination; because the site is down; would that not be load bearing?

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#197

Post by dvngnt_ » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:27 PM UTC

rustyhancock wrote: post #178

JimmyBiscuit wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sold me a Pixel phone with a broken battery (I think 6a? Where the battery fails after 400 charging cycles). I got an email and the offer to just get 100$ in cash from them instead of sending my phone away to get it fixed. I never received the money after filling out all the forms. Fuck google.

My pixel 7 battery was dreadful, and despite it being promised to come with 3 months of YouTube premium and Music I didn't successfully redeem either. I admit once it didn't work I didn't reach out to support but the entire experience was shit sandwich after shit sandwich.

I had to disable 5G on my pixel 8 to get decent battery life

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#198

Post by mkl » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

drcongo wrote: post #101

gib444 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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 th…

ZeroTier. It works well for me. I chose it over Tailscale because it doesn't require a third party for login.

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#199

Post by dismalaf » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #144

dismalaf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Even with their issues, they're still less evil than MS, Apple and especially Oracle or Meta. If they didn't have all their issues (discontinuing products, bad customer service) they'd probably be bigger than MS and Apple combined. But here we are. Also for better or worse, I pay for bundled Google storage + Gemini and YouTube separately, it's still worth it, even without free months or whatever. And still…

> it's still worth it, even without free months or whatever Until you go of the rails of their processes and have your account closed with no recourse.

Sometimes I worry about this but everytime I see an example of it I feel better (because most examples involve the person doing weird things).

Re: My Google Workspace account suspension

#200

Post by lokar » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

mentalgear wrote: post #169

lokar wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the actual phrase came from an engineer.

Also, the executives 'retired' the official 'Don't be evil' slogan some time ago. I guess they didn't want to be limited. Seems fitting to the suits.

The finance people and mgmt consultants took over the company from the engineers a while ago.