Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

The founder of a service that manages SSL certificates says Google Cloud has suspended his account three times, without good reason, and recommended not using the G-Cloud for serious workloads. In a Monday post, Andrew Ayer, founder of SSLMate, explains that his company uses Google Cloud for “testing and experimentation,” but …

[Pascal Monett]

The problem is simple

Google doesn't like other people making money off its back.

The money goes to Google. If it doesn't, your account is suspended.

When it does, in its magnificence, Google might decide to throw you a few pennies.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and water is wet

Google's reputation in this area is well established.

Remember the meme: 'The cloud is just someone else's computer'

You want full control, host or Colo your own platform.

[vtcodger]

Re: ...and water is wet

The cloud is just someone else's computer

Indeed. And in fairness to Google, despite an incredibly complex software stack, and interfacing routinely with several zillion users, they have -- so far as we know -- managed to avoid significant security breaches. One problem is that in the process of securing their business, service reliability has suffered. A second is that their customer service is problemetic at best.

Sadly, I doubt this is just a Google problem. I suspect it is going to be true of any broadbased cloud service.

Don't get me wrong. The cloud is great for streaming entertainment or for getting a wide variety of advice -- some good, some outdated, some awful -- on just about any conceivable problem as well as for many other things.

However, probably a lot of folks currently depending on the cloud for things important to them probably should be looking at declouding their efforts.

[MachDiamond]

Re: ...and water is wet

"so far as we know -- managed to avoid significant security breaches. "

A big problem is Google itself so even with a perfect security reputation, the damage is still done.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ...and water is wet

If you don't like Google, start your own Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ...and water is wet

Has Google said its Gemini AI is going to make everything better yet?

If not, give it time.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: ...and water is wet

"If you don't like Google, start your own Google."

Many, many have. All sorts of companies, apps and systems, which are inevitably stifled and/or bought up by Google and their ilk. It's incredibly difficult to compete with someone with no morals and many orders of magnitude more money than you. If you are competing with the big boys then you either sell out to them or they beat you into submission or bankruptcy.

[Andy Non]

I don't even trust Google with basic email

A few years ago I foolishly explored the idea of having a Gmail account as my primary email account. It didn't go well. I like all my emails stored locally so set up POP3 access as documented by Google so I could send and receive email locally via Thunderbird. I sent and received a few email tests without problem ... and a few hours later google suspended my account for "suspicious activity". So that was the end of that.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

I wonder if that’s because it likes customers to leave their private going’s-on on their servers so Gemini can have a good look through them. But even long ago they would unhelpfully try to categorise emails as important and a bit junky. Having said that, their anti-spam filters are the best around by a country mile.

[Frank Zuiderduin]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

Really? In my experience, their filters are the best in marking things as spam that aren't.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

Every couple of weeks I dip into the murky depths of my gmail Spam folder, and it's years since I've found a non-spam email in there.

I've had my Gmail account for 21 years now, and collect a lot of spam, and not a single false positive in years.

Maybe I'm lucky, maybe you're unlucky...

[Mark #255]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

The most recent ham/spam mix-up I had was when I submitted a ticket to my email hosting provider. Google decided that the emails from the provider's ticketing system were spam, and it took me a few hours to realise where the messages were going, and that my issue was being fixed.

[AlanBStard]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

A lot of stuff it just drops silently. Spam folder sees a small amount of stuff.

But they have enormous amounts of data on every nook of interwebs and user emails and how they get marked, so their filters are mostly good for standard content

[retiredFool]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

And interestingly, my worst offender for sending SPAM is a tie between outlook and gmail. I host my own email and now gmail/outlook have a ok list. Anything not on the ok list gets a 450. I check about once a day to see if I should let any in. Usually its a nope, more spam and so gets a toss 550.

[Teal Bee]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

Gmail is the biggest spam operator on the planet from my perspective, it sends more spam to my users than all other platforms combined.

[Claptrap314]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

At my last job, I would mark vendor spam as spam. It did not matter, the next email from the same vendor came through just fine. So, yeah. Gmail considered harmful.

[PRR]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

> ....it likes customers to leave their private going’s-on on their servers so Gemini can have a good look through them

Bah. Their POP could 'erase' messages from your view while still keeping them on hand.

But they probably scanned and analyzed your mail before you saw it.

[LBJsPNS]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

Odd, I use TB with Gmail daily with no incidents.

[Return To Sender]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

> "Odd, I use TB with Gmail daily with no incidents."

Was going to comment similarly, been using TB with GMail for years, no problem. Although I use IMAP not POP3, fwiw

[vogon00]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

ISTR that depends on your authentication methods. POP3/IMAP using password Auth=a no-no, even if you 'allow less secure apps: I'not even sure that's possible now...so.....

i don't have any problem with TB at home, where I use an OAUTH authentication method with Gmail.

[Gene Cash]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

I moved away from Gmail a few years back when they went on a rampage about "real names"

They suspended quite a few of my friends for "not using their real names" who were indeed using their real names. And insisted on seeing birth certificates and driver's licenses.

Since I go by a shortened version of my middle name, like one of my friends that got suspended, I GTFOed.

That's the sort of arbitrary thing Google does, which makes them impossible to use for anything you depend on. I make damn sure to have my phone rsync-ed daily locally so if they decided tomorrow to suspend my account for whatever, I don't lose everything.

[Marty McFly]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

I pay the money for my own domain, and I pay for email hosting with a mainstream provider.

About half of the emails I send to colleagues who have Gmail addresses get tossed in their spam folder. Lame reason given.... My domain does not have a strong reputation and therefore must be a spammer. Nevermind that I have owned the domain for years, and no spam has ever been sent from it. Simply because it is used to lightly makes it suspicious of spam.

Yup, if you don't sent a lot of emails you must be a spammer. At least according to Google's logic.

I am sure it is just a coincidence because I am not a Gmail user. They would never block someone who took accountability for their own email...

[MachDiamond]

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

"About half of the emails I send to colleagues who have Gmail addresses get tossed in their spam folder. Lame reason given.... My domain does not have a strong reputation and therefore must be a spammer. "

That's the same sort of thing that happens to me and the issue is that it's when I'm sending links to their files on my server. They use gmail in a business setting and are computer illiterate enough to not know the difference between a browser and an email client. Most of them are using Chrome which compounds the issue so I have to get them set up with Firefox or Librewolf and teach them to copy/paste the URL so they can download their files. The ones that have a DropBox account have a hard time setting me up to be able to drop files straight to them. It's also the free account and they've filled it up with useless photos from their phone anyway. I don't want to pay for file transfer services as my hosting provider lets me do this as part of my package.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"He now thinks SSLMate needs to ditch Google Cloud."

Presumably on the three strikes principle.

Curious if Alphabet offers a similar (ie competing) service through one of its subsidary acquisitions ?

You can be certain such sharp business practices are perfectly legal in USofA and de rigeur.

[PCScreenOnly]

Ignore what I saw

Makes me laugh when their own documentaiton says "you can do this, that the other", or "to do this, you configure like this" and then they say you are breaking whatever silly decision today

If you do not want anyone to utilise it, then don't document it for people to read, understand and then implement.

If he is using undocumented methods / API calls, fair enough

[Doctor Syntax]

Consider the size discrepancy between your own company and those you're choosing as suppliers. If they're sufficiently bigger than yours that your custom is insignificant to them then expect to receive bad service.

[Excused Boots]

Very, very much this - and it has always been so.

I recall conversations I had with bosses of SMEs back in the early days of Exchange online, they would wax lyrical about the advantages, especially not having to have someone who could look after an on-prem Exchange server, and surely the support level and reliability would be a lot higher?

My response was always along the lines of ‘this is completely true, to a point. I suspect that if we took 1000 SMEs with on-prem resources, moved all them into the cloud and then compared the total downtime of all of them before and after, I fully expect that, yes, overall the cloud is more reliable’

‘But, if some kind of issue takes ‘your’ company out, there is nothing you can do about it, nothing I can do about it, there is nobody you can shout at, demand it be fixed NOW or else. You will sit quietly and wait, it doesn’t matter how important you think your company is; compared to Microsoft; you are nothing, they really couldn’t care less if you go out of business. Your choice.’

And that was the 'good old days’, now, even more of a company’s data is cloud-based, and the cloud suppliers seem to take even less responsibility.

A lot of the management is fully automated, you’ll get banned or otherwise lose access to your data because of a faulty algorithm. Yes it might be a one in a million chance, but we all know how often they happens! And that would be OK if, if there was some way of getting through to a human who could apply a degree of common sense - but having people in the loop seems to be anathema to the cloud suppliers.

And that’s about it, probably it won't happen to you, but if it does - tough!

[Anonymous Coward]

I set up a Google account to log into my company’s developer portal for the Play store. I only logged in the once to check it worked, but within 28 days the account was suspended. I appealed and the appeal was rejected. At no time was I told what I had supposedly done. Now they just ignore me.

I hate that company with a passion.

[Anonymous Coward]

re: At no time was I told what I had supposedly done

could it also be

At no time was I told what I had supposedly NOT done?

Avoid Google.... You know it makes sense.

[A. Coatsworth]

Well, mr Josef K, that would be your problem, not Google's

[xanadu42]

Look for a new Google Product...

Named "Google Auto SSL"...

[steelpillow]

Enshittification

A perfect example of the way Web2 is going.

As my grandparents used to say, if you want something doing, you have to do it yourself.

[JWLong]

AI rules thé world...,..

.....we just don't know what the rules are!

And, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to tell ús.

[breakfast]

Re: AI rules thé world...,..

Also AI doesn't know what the rules are, or at least it always knows what the rules are but because it is non-deterministic the rules change every time it is run.

Seeing big companies put that in charge of processes has started to make me wonder whether I'm the insane one because I cannot comprehend any universe in which that is a good idea.

[Brl4n]

Re: AI rules thé world...,..

I hope there is a surge of anti-AI/anti-cloud products. Small to medium sized businesses need working products that perform as intended and within a clear budget.

[ABugNamedJune]

Re: AI rules thé world...,..

Been seeing this a lot with folks who use Google's platform. I follow a number of really niche, super tiny people on YouTube, and three of them on separate occasions have posted dedicated videos that are basically like "hey, my account got flagged for ban evasion and referenced an account that was banned fifteen years ago in an entirely different part of the world, I managed to recover my account this time, but if my channel goes dark, you can find me [elsewhere]"

Not only are people going to lost access to their personal files, we as a whole are going to lose access to a lot of built-up knowledge available only on Google, and this isn't going to do great things for Google as a platform.

Bought my mom two 2tb WD Black spinning disks and put them in an older computer in RAID-1 to get her and her pictures off Google Drive

[StinkyMcStinkFace]

If you put your stuff "in the cloud", you are a dumbass. Sorry, not sorry.

[David Hicklin]

I'll give you an upvote with the condition that your statement should have read (corrections in CAPS)

"If you put ALL your stuff "ONLY in the cloud", you are a dumbass. Sorry, not sorry."

You need a DR plan for what happens when (not if) the cloud service evaporates, problem is most businesses (or ordinary people) have one.

Me ? multiple backups , some offline unless making a backups. yes it's work but my data is as safe as I can make it.

[MadocOwain]

Many moons ago, I had a GeoCities website. Once I outgrew it I set it to forward connections to my new domain and website, and over time I didn't even have the email address I used to register the GeoCities site with. GeoCities 'went away' and was forgotten for years until Yahoo! bought it. At some point, they decided it was against their TOS to have connections to my forgotten website forward to another domain in the manner I did (basic HTML), and cancelled my Yahoo! account. I no longer had access to any of my email, among other inconveniences. I appealed it, they re-opened my account but refused to restore any emails I had stored in that account!

Lessons learned - all mail saved locally, don't rely on one single company for services, and never EVER trust the rug won't be pulled out from under your Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple accounts without warning. At least then, I couldn't lose phone service (landline), access to maps (paper), or photos (printed) if a service went away for me. Today? Lose Amazon and you can't shop at Whole Foods or get packages delivered. We're one merger away from losing basic autonomy.

[Blackjack]

“When SSLMate needs to access a customer's Google Cloud account, it impersonates the corresponding service account.”

I don't think any legit Cloud Service wouldn't have given him problems.

https://cloud.google.com/terms

Ehem "(b) Verification to use GWS Services. Customer must verify a Domain Email Address or a Domain Name to use GWS Services. If Customer does not have valid permission to use the Domain Email Address or does not own or control the Domain Name, then Google will have no obligation to provide Customer with GWS Services and may delete the Account without notice."

[John Brown (no body)]

"If Customer does not have valid permission to use the Domain Email Address or does not own or control the Domain Name,"

That word "or" between the clauses is quite important. SSLMate clearly DOES have "valid permission" from it's customers, making everything after the "or" irrelevant.

It looks like Google is simply not believing that SSLMate has "valid permission" and is not bothering to ask for or check if it exists.

[TeeCee]

...as Google asked him to provide information that was only accessible if he logged in...

All too common these days. When MFA is involved, trying to get back in when locked out ranges from "shitshow" to "fucking impossible".

My all time favourite example was attempting to use Google's own service to find where I'd mislaid my phone when away from home.

1) Find another computer - check

2) Get the owner to allow me to use it - check

3) Log into Google while thanking Fuck, Shit and all their little pixies that I had stuck with a password than I can actually remember rather than allowing some POS that I now cannot use to generate one.

4) Great. now I just need to enter a 2FA authentication code.... Ah.... Right... That'll be on the phone that I'm trying to find... feeling less smug about the password...

5) 2hr Drive home.

6) Find device using another machine that I own and which is thus already set up and previously thumped in the "don't give me that 2FA shit" button.

7) Find device.

8) 2hr drive back to get it.

This does not seem like a practical way of doing things to me..

[rivimey]

That will be a good reason to use a 2FA source that is not in itself a single-point-of-failure, such as a phone or dongle.

I use 1Password for this (& other) reasons. Other options are available.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Microsoft, IBM, etc long before it, Google has become too stupid and bloated to do anything well any more.

[Brl4n]

They're currently ensuring Android is enshittified to the max!!!

[John Klos]

Companies without humans...

Google doesn't care if they don't make sense. Heck - I think they flaunt the fact that you can't talk with people there, because they don't want to waste their time with anyone who's not paying them a good bit of money.

They're stupid, too - if you frequently send spam that comes from Google to [e-mail] / [e-mail], they'll consider you a spammer.

Even huge multimillion subscriber YouTubers can't communicate with Google / YouTube without getting form responses that show that Google / YouTube just has someone mashing form response buttons, like the receptionist at the hospital in Idiocracy.

I think the evaluation that you shouldn't use Google for critical services is spot on, and it's nice to be able to point to stories like this as examples for the less technical folks.

[ecofeco]

I never get tired of saying it

So, how's that cloud thing working for you?

[hx]

Google is not a serious company

They have never been a serious company. They also will eventually kill every product they have. Let's not even think about what that actually means for their ad-supported products.

[Anonymous Coward]

Happened with my son's account

which is only a couple weeks' old now. Google locked him out of the account, with the reason being something about having multiple accounts. Which he doesn't, being only 10 years old; he doesn't even have the password to THIS account. And locking him out of his Google account meant he couldn't log into his Chromebook to do schoolwork. Thankfully they did reinstate it, but him losing everything on the Chromebook was a distinct possibility. (A dirty trick - the hardware is useless if Google so decides?)

Which got me thinking about my couple-decade-old Gmail account. Not only is it the email used for all my accounts everywhere else (so all "forgot your password" messages get sent there, etc.), and a great deal of "ought to keep this for documentation" emails, but it has some messages from loved ones who passed away years ago that I'd rather not lose. If Google arbitrarily decides (probably using "AI") that accounts have violated their TOCs and need to disappear, and the only recourse is an appeal (probably also handled by "AI"), the chances of me losing all of it are surprisingly high.

Can someone recommend an email company to switch to? I'm thinking something paid (so I'm the customer not the product), and offers webpage-based mail. I'm in the US, if that makes a difference.

[DoctorPaul]

Re: Happened with my son's account

For a start maybe use Thunderbird and keep a local copy of your mailbox.

Protonmail might work well for you, plus it will automatically export your mail from Gmail during setup and then redirect any further emails on to the Protonmail account.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Happened with my son's account

Thank you, DoctorPaul and jlturriff, for the feedback. I have Thunderbird syncing my messages now (only 11,000 to go in the inbox!) and will look into Protonmail and mail.com.

[jlturriff]

Re: Happened with my son's account

I'm happy with my mail.com (not Gmail.com) account, which I find very reliable, though I do use POP and download everything, filtering it on my local machine.

(I have to admit that their web interface sucks, bu then, all mail service web interfaces suck, IMO.)

[Ex-PFY]

Re: Happened with my son's account

You'll want to get those emails backed up now, a while ago Google changed the ToS to say any account not logged in to after 2years would be considered for pruning.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/#:~:text=To%20reduce%20this%20risk%2C%20we,to%20keep%20your%20account%20active

[Bor-e-q-ahh]

Nothing is Free

Google is like the drug dealer selling crack once they have their customer base addicted they will use you and abuse you.

Like others have mentioned, you need to stop using their products, and don't rely on anybody's service for your business or you will die by their sword.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Nothing is Free

"Google is like the drug dealer selling crack once they have their customer base addicted they will use you and abuse you."

If you figure out a way to make too much money leveraging their services, they'll not have that.