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

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

#61
post #57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us. Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.

Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…

That was just a feature of the product to be helpful. Not a core function at all.

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

#62
post #57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us. Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.

Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…

How many services have meaningful SLAs for extreme downtime?

Github and (parts of) AWS will give you a small discount at 0.1% downtime, a bigger discount at 1% downtime, and AWS will refund the whole month for 5% downtime. But beyond that they don't care. If a particular customer gets no service at all then their entire $0 gets refunded and that's it.

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

#64
post #11

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.

OP is not clear , but it looks like GCP suspension not Google one (I.e email android etc) All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension . I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)

i was thinking more in terms of tort law or contract law. They probably have a disclaimer and Tos that addresses all that, but given enough plaintiffs and their market dominance, it might amount to possible deliberate/calculated financial harm. It might be enough to not get thrown out of court at least. They can reject business for any reason, but once someone relies on their services for their business, there is always a certain expectation of continued service, and in the event of service termination, they may not need to explain themselves, but they must accommodate reasonable requests to transfer data, customers,etc.. elsewhere. Otherwise it sounds like tortiuous interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.

In this case, people who use GCP have customers and other contractual relationships. Google's termination of service interfered with that. Google also doing this as a matter of standard business practice indicates that they are aware that their action will interfere with people's contractual obligations (well common sense should tell them that anyways).

You can't force someone to sign a contract with you that says "if I interfere with your future contracts with arbitrary third parties on purpose, you can't sue me". The deliberate part is crucial from what I understand. If their decision making couldn't have accounted for the interference, and the interference wasn't calculated as an acceptable risk, there is no issue. But the plaintiffs can claim that repeated social media posts and acknowledgements of said interference by Google over the years means it's enough grounds for a suit. and a suit will mean discovery, google will have go hand over internal documents, depose employees,etc...

In the end, this might be more costly to companies like Google than just giving customers a grace period to move elsewhere before termination.

Obligatory: IANAL, I'm just a guy using big words I barely understand.

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

#65
post #23

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.

Of all the posts like this I’ve seen the customers are always 1) extremely scant on details about what they were using GCP for or why they were suspended, and more importantly 2) never actually paying for support. Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.

There have been plenty of posts where the reason was apparent. One i recall was caused by a guy having malware on his phone, and he happened to use a work email on his phone, so the entire GWS organization was banned, shutting down the company's operations.

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

#66

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.

> but the punitive impact might change things Call me cynical but I have little to no hope that even class actions would solve anything. These companies have become so big that they can take one class action after another for years to come without making a dent in their financials and without bringing any change to their operating procedures.

I'm just expecting them to change their calculus. Right now it costs them nothing to randomly shut down accounts. If it had some cost, perhaps some minor notice, accommodation,etc.. however automated might be worth just the man hours spent on lawsuits.

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

#67
post #2

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…

Has AWS support gone downhill in the last two years? I've worked with them in the past - as both an individual and a couple startups - I always reached a human. Issues weren't always resolved as quickly as I'd like but response times were short.

Last time I checked you had to pay something like $400/mo extra for legit, timely human support from AWS.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has AWS support gone downhill in the last two years? I've worked with them in the past - as both an individual and a couple startups - I always reached a human. Issues weren't always resolved as quickly as I'd like but response times were short.

It has! In the 2010s I always got an AWS support team to help. Now I get handed off to an external partner of AWS certified contractors. They are often terrible. They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk". Basically trying to find an issue in my pipeline. Which they never do because it's the same TF scripts used for years. Only once we waste time goi…

> They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk"

To be fair I would bet money that the overwhelmingly vast majority of support tickets are exactly those kind of issues, and ones that refer to actual bugs on their end are, comparatively, extremely rare, and should have to be escalated through normal procedures to weed out common problems.

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

#70
post #2

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…

Has AWS support gone downhill in the last two years? I've worked with them in the past - as both an individual and a couple startups - I always reached a human. Issues weren't always resolved as quickly as I'd like but response times were short.

I have the same question. I always got human response after 24-48hours or after one round of messages (with an automated human or machine, not sure). But so far, across 3 accounts and a dozens of correspondence, I always got a human.
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