[HN Gopher] Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated
replies
My Google account has been suspended from GCP since March 2024. I
have submitted multiple appeals through ts-consult@google.com over
2 years. Every time I get the same automated template asking me to
explain, I reply with details, then nothing. No human ever
responds. Case: #1-8622000037271 Timeline: - March 2024:
Suspended, appeal submitted - April 2024: Automated requests for
info, I replied - Nov 2024: More automated emails, I replied again
- Dec 2024 - now: Complete silence I am a CS researcher at UC
Berkeley. This has seriously impacted my work. Has anyone
successfully gotten Google to review a GCP suspension appeal? How
do you reach a human?
Author : andylizf
Score : 83 points
Date : 2026-01-31 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| Working in small and medium businesses I've observed the same
| thing, and I've been quite satisfied with it. So I don't
| think it's really gone downhill, so GP's comment doesn't
| really resonate for me, but that isn't to negate their
| experience. Otoh I keep hearing horror stories about GCP and
| now I'm reluctant to try it.
| vrosas wrote:
| Shitting on GCP is just popular on HN and always gets
| upvoted. AWS and Azure have royally fucked thousands of
| customers if you care to search for those writeups. My wild
| ass guess, considering posts like these have zero
| background details, is that they were careless with service
| account keys and their account got suspended for mining
| crypto or something. They also probably weren't actually
| _paying_ for support of any kind and that's why no one is
| responding to them.
| benSaiyen wrote:
| 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 going through the motions do I get
| passed up to someone who can actually correct the backend
| issue in the AWS stack itself.
|
| Tbf though I rarely ever have to contact AWS support at this
| point. The few times I have in the last 2-3 was due to issues
| after they rolled out an update or with a newer service we
| wanted to use.
|
| Never have issues with stable services like S3, ECS, EKS, or
| RDS.
| manquer wrote:
| if you want best support (while staying with big cloud) then
| Microsoft is the best .
|
| Azure has its flaws but Microsoft puts a lot of people and
| effort behind it . We are not that large but there are so many
| instances where Microsoft reps will come in call with our
| customers or their people working with common customers will
| help out etc.
|
| AWS has a done a decent job of taking enterprise business
| seriously last 10 years. you can get human support but
| generally they will charge you , I.e if better support you want
| you have to pay for premium support plans .
|
| They are constrained unlike MS they don't have non-cloud large
| enterprise business relationships for decades M365 or AD etc
| that helps with building the enterprise DNA.
|
| In all three clouds it works best if you don't buy directly,
| buy through a partner reseller , who both have the
| relationships to the CSP and have the people to work with you .
| mystraline wrote:
| Sorry, no.
|
| MS is the same network were even their lead engineers answer
| "well, uhh create a new account and hope you're not banned",
| when it comes to fixing a illegitimate ban issue.
|
| None of the biggies are good. None of them.
|
| You're better off building your own data enter. Can't believe
| I'm saying that, but I am. And it doesnt have to be acres and
| MW and water cooled. It can be a 42U rack.
|
| Hell, I'm a homeowner and have 27U rack with 10U full,
| battery backup, solar, fiber and a backup internet
| connection, and stuff.
|
| A small business could easy do this and own the hardware and
| software to their enterprise. In fact, they probably should.
| Helps prevent rug pulls!
| pousada wrote:
| Having run a small business on one of the big clouds for
| almost 10 years now building your own data center is insane
| advice.
|
| >easy
|
| Hell no
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Now I am curious what is the realistic price a business
| would expect to put down for a full rack. Say UPS, switch,
| 4-8U storage, and the rest CPU compute. Without
| entertaining GPUs, I bet you can get very respectably
| speced 1-2U servers for $5k a pop. So few hundred thousand
| probably gets you just an unbelievable amount of
| horsepower.
| vrosas wrote:
| Quota for what? In my experience the GCP service quotas are
| pretty sensible and if you're running up against them you're
| either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often)
| you're just using that service incorrectly.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Quota for what?
|
| Sure, I'm interested too.
|
| > In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible
| and if you're running up against them you're either dealing
| with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you're just
| using that service incorrectly.
|
| Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they
| got detailed approval and they're paying for it.
| vrosas wrote:
| Sure, but the comment is so vague I'm skeptical the OP knew
| what they were doing in the first place, or it happened
| exactly as they wrote. Maybe a service quota was reset to
| the default? But just set to zero? Doesn't pass the sniff
| test.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| "... and they're paying for it..." - that might be the
| exact issue. Google has no way to ensure that these small
| shops and startups will pay their bill, so quotas are used
| to prevent the company from running up a large bill they
| won't be able to pay.
|
| I see a bunch of threads on reddit about startups
| accidentally going way over budget and then asking for
| credits back.
|
| This doesn't at all mean the startups have bad intent, but
| things happen and Google doesn't want to deal with a huge
| collection issue.
|
| If someone rolled up to your gas station and wanted to pump
| 10,000 gallons of gas but only pay you next month - would
| you allow it?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Well that is kind of a problem of their own making. The
| clouds _refuse_ to entertain the prospect of pre-paying
| for services /having some sort of hard spending limits
| because they know that over-allocation is probably
| driving a decent amount of revenue.
| bilekas wrote:
| I dont really understand ops problem as I've been able to
| set monthly limits on expenditure. Seems trivial to
| setup.
| vrosas wrote:
| That's not how quotas work in GCP. Google sets quotas for
| certain APIs for interacting with GCP itself, like how
| many VMs you can create per second. They're not billable.
| Sometimes these quotas can be be increased if you need
| them to be. But the way op described it makes no sense.
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to
| their emails within 48 hours but their responses take 1-3 weeks
|
| It boggles my mind anyone would base their business on their
| good will. By now it should be obvious that companies with a
| huge number of customers don't care about individual cases that
| much for obvious reasons. That's why they cut on customer
| support. You get much better support with smaller companies
| where you (as an individual or business) are much more
| important to them.
| tonymet wrote:
| A colleague had a similar quota issue. 4 times quota
| restoration request was rejected. Upon the final request he put
| "women owned startup helping underprivileged kids" and it was
| approved.
|
| It can't hurt.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| 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.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| > let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues.
|
| Nah, big tech infiltrates everything, it's 100% their fault.
| Why did everyone switch to webmail? Why did we gravitate to web
| apps? Big tech persuaded us all to do it.
|
| With big promises comes great responsibility, and the stuff in
| the fine print doesn't count. It's not ethical to invite
| dependency and randomly kneecap people; it shouldn't be legal
| either.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| 100% agree with you. The big techs are definitely 100% at
| fault. But you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me
| twice...
|
| I mean, we get these stories every month. Yes, 100% it is not
| ethical to randomly kneecap people. But let's be honest.
| Nobody is working on making these big tech companies
| accountable for the potentially devastating, algorithm-driven
| decisions they take. How many more times do they have to fool
| us before we all realize that it's time to move away from
| them?
|
| All I ask from you, myself and all the tech folks here is to
| learn from these lessons and pass them on to everyone around
| you. With how things are today, it is reckless to depend on
| these big tech cloud services for your livelihood and
| profession. If you're working for a company where the company
| has leverage, all good. But as an individual, you should stay
| away from these big tech companies, because they can screw up
| your life any day, without warning and without recourse.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Mars persuaded me to buy their chocolate. I couldn't help
| myself.
| josephcsible wrote:
| With email in particular, it's not like chocolate. If you
| self-host email, or use any other cloud host besides
| Microsoft or Google, then Microsoft and Google will
| randomly fail to deliver emails you send to their users,
| even though you have SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. set up exactly
| right.
| tonymet wrote:
| Seriously #2 is your only recourse. Download the terms of
| service / your service contract , highlight their violations
| and send them a certified letter about breach of contract and
| that you intend legal recourse.
| bilbo-b-baggins wrote:
| Unless you know someone at Google with a little swagger to get
| things done you're shit out of luck.
| dude250711 wrote:
| The role of GCP is to help enterprises negotiate better deals
| out of Azure/AWS. Why would anyone actually use it is beyond
| me...
| mandeepj wrote:
| Did you tweet them - https://x.com/googlecloud?
|
| If it's so important, maybe talk with a lawyer.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| 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)
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > 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.
| vrosas wrote:
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I have yet to see someone say why they were suspended.
|
| I've always wondered why, this makes sense.
| betaby wrote:
| > 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"
| throwaway150 wrote:
| Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This may be snark, but
| this is 100% needed in the world we live in today. It is a fact
| of today's world that individuals have no leverage over these
| companies. I can understand why big companies, who have
| leverage, buy their services. But I don't understand why
| individuals, who have no leverage, buy their services and build
| their profession and livelihood around them. Any day, they can
| cut you off from their services. You are being irresponsible to
| yourself if you put all your eggs in these big tech baskets.
|
| We seriously do need this kind of research and compelling
| articles that argue why relying on these big tech cloud
| services is harmful for individuals.
| vrosas wrote:
| Or "Why I should have been paying for support if my entire
| career depended on it."
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| There are so many things with this statement I don't even
| know where to start. I hope you're being sarcastic.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of
| the Lord. - Job 1:21
| moregrist wrote:
| > 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| 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?
| hudo wrote:
| How come your business or research are so tied to GCP? What about
| other providers?
| tonymet wrote:
| This is an asinine question. Even if you build agnostic
| solutions (like a docker image), you have storage resources,
| networks, configs, ACLs, snapshots and more all trapped inside
| GCP. we're human -- we forget to backup things, or push
| important commits . And we know cloud solutions quickly develop
| lock-in - even a simple cloud DB instance locks you into the
| vendors config .
|
| So there are at least a dozen perfectly good reasons this guy
| is panicking that his account was suddenly revoked without
| warning.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not asinine. This suspension happened _two years ago_. I
| don 't see any sudden panicking.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| One of the many reasons I continue to degoogle and remove that
| garbage from my life wherever I can. So many cases like this.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| Also, why wait 2 years to take it public?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Plenty of GCP, AWS and Azure experiences in this thread, but any
| Cloudflare experiences?
| tonymet wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-31 23:01 UTC)