[morrbo]

It's a bit shit that they had to jump through so many hoops, with HN being the only one that actually worked (after 7 hours) in order to get in touch. Serious kudos to you for helping them but I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch your company with a bargepole for these kind of reasons. Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

[gtsop]

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

Exactly. I'm locked out of a google account I have which links to a yt channel and a twitter account. The only truly viable option for me to get these back is work my way up the social media infulencing ladder and then complain how I lost access to my accounts. This is insane.

[vodkapump]

I had a similar issue as you, what ended up working for me was to contact the support for payment issues, and saying I had issues with paying for something.

Got in contact with a real human (i think..) in chat in under a minute, which helped me get it resolved via filling out like 4 different forms.

No idea if this would work for you though, but worth a try?

[sshagent]

I've had to use this kinda method for other things. No way to get a hold of a real person for support, try their new customer contact details. you can get they answer those real quick!

[ZephyrBlu]

Google is a different beast entirely. Complaining on social media doesn't generally work.

[capableweb]

Not really true. If you manage to get a "Google locked me out for no reason" post to hover on the frontpage of HN for a couple of hours, you most likely will get help from some Google insider. There are been plenty of such posts on HN where the issue has been resolved by what I assume to be HN-googlers.

[ZephyrBlu]

It is true. I've seen multiple posts where Googlers or ex-Googlers with contacts can't get access to a locked Google account.

[fatnoah]

I had an issue with a propane company contractor failing to secure permits before installing a line, which caused an expensive backyard project to grind to a halt, while still incurring cost. Every call to support was met with very friendly folks who promised a call back same day.

That never, ever happened and I had to resort to a nicely worded note to a corporate VP on LinkedIn to resolve it. Even then, I'm pretty sure that "unpermitted gas line work" was the real driver in getting it resolved, since that's a big deal.

[anonporridge]

It makes sense.

If the problem really gets kicked up in the media and left unaddressed, then eventually politicians will be forced to add some real regulation to force companies to do right by their customers.

That'd be expensive. So instead, ignore customers who can't kick up social attention and quickly resolve those that can before it gets legs. No one cares about the unknown, disconnected hordes of betrayed customers who lost their access for unknown reasons.

And I'm sure no company is covertly doing this to their tiny, would be competitors, killing the baby in the crib so to speak.

In fact, if you're an employee that actually cares about your customers, you'd do well to not internally raise these issues. Let the PR hit the executives harder and make them squirm.

[probably_wrong]

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

I'm kinda sad that the thread is about Twilio and not Google - my GMail account is blocked and I was hoping I could jump on the bandwagon.

Someone here should make a startup out of it.

[duiker101]

Every so often a thread identical to this one appears for Google. The bottom line is always the same, don't use Google for anything that matters.

[gtsop]

This is good advice, but i need to wrap up the things I had set up on my accounts and then close the accounts. I need access to do that

[cute_boi]

same. I had a issue with google payment. It was around $5. Emailed them 100 times even phoned them for hours. They didn't solved the issue .

After I shamed them in twitter/github the issue got solved in 1 day.

The world is has become too wild tbh.