[alexdiacre]

Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If anyone G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access)

[danirod]

Once again, it seems the only way to reach actual human support on the Google ecosystem is by having a "locked out of my account" thread trending on some social network.

It simply blows my mind that one of the most powerful tech companies in the world is still doing these mistakes. Not even the G Suite tier, which I would assume it's a more professional tier than the free one.

(Disclaimer: I'm assuming this Reddit post is true, which may or may not be the case here.)

[alexdiacre]

Hi danirod

For G Suite Basic, Business and Enterprise customers we provide 24 x 7 support via chat, phone and email.

[flukus]

Does this extend to customers who have had their account suspended?

[alexdiacre]

Hi flukus

Yes - you can create a case at https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access

[alexdiacre]

TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims.

Greetings. This is Alex Diacre again from Google’s G Suite Support team with a followup. In order to protect the privacy of all our customers and users, it is our policy not to disclose information relating to specific customer accounts in public forums. But given the amount of attention this post received, I’d like to offer some insight on the results of our investigation on this matter:

-The original poster on Reddit (OP) did not identify him/herself or the customer account. We have made several attempts to reach out to the OP through PM, but have yet to receive a response. (If the OP or someone from his/her company is reading this, please get in touch with me).

- We have tried to identify the customer based on the information in the original post, including an extensive review of recent support cases, but have not found any cases resembling the description.

To note, Technical Support is available to G Suite customers 24/7 via chat, phone and email. We’re happy to work with the OP to investigate this matter further; until then, we have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Technical Support can be accessed at https://gsuite.google.com/support/

[natch]

>Phone Support

>Available to G Suite administrators only. Log in to your admin account for verification.

If an account is banned, how would they log in to their admin account?

I have nothing to do with OP, don't know who they are, etc... Just curious how this would work when you don't display their phone number until they log in, and their login credentials might not work. Same for email and chat, according to the text of the page you linked (https://gsuite.google.com/support/).

Yet you mention these as ways to get support. Am I missing something?

[profmonocle]

Hi Alex, is there a chance we could get some follow-up on this? I manage the G Suite account at my company, and the idea that an irresponsible or disgruntled employee could take down our whole account is very worrying. (Especially since our G Suite accounts are tied to our GCP account.)

Assuming the story isn't simply made up, I'd rest easier knowing whatever caused the problem (both the initial mass banning and Google's unwillingness to help) has been fixed.

[alexdiacre]

Hi profmonocle

We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.

If you're not already doing the following we recommend the following steps to protect your G Suite account - have more than one super admin - ensure an up-to-date recovery email is in the account profile - ensure an up-to-date recovery phone is in the account profile - ensure account profile is properly updated - use two factor authentication for all users (ideally user security keys) - at a minimum, ensure that your G Suite administrator users are using two factor authentication

Lots more info on G Suite security best practices can be found here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/7587183

[profmonocle]

If the story in the OP is true, none of those steps would have mattered, because the entire organization was banned. Protecting admin accounts is very doable, preventing all your employees from ever doing anything bad with their accounts is impossible.

I realize you can't comment on specific incidents, but a simple statement from Google saying "no, we definitely won't ban entire organizations including connected personal accounts because of one user's actions" would go a long way to put people at ease here.

[16bytes]

Looks like a pretty big "if" at this point. The user didn't respond to any DMs from Google and the story sounds very suspect.

They won't make a blanket statement like you want because there are bad actors out there that they have to respond to.

Anyways, there's 24x7 phone support and ways to get support even if you're completely locked out. What more do you want?

[natch]

>Anyways, there's 24x7 phone support and ways to get support even if you're completely locked out. What more do you want?

Umm the 24x7 phone support number is not listed on the web page.

To get the phone number, you need to log in.

How do you log in, if you're locked out?

>What more do you want?

What do you think?

[16bytes]

Well, from the post from G Suite support person [1], there's

https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223

[lovehashbrowns]

To be honest, your team should make addressing this story in public a priority because it has given you a lot of negative attention. There are hundreds of comments spread out between this HNews post, the sysadmin cross-post, and the tifu post. I'd be really curious to know if the entire story was made up altogether or if there was any missing info that was pertinent to what happened and why.