> They have no phone number to contact, no way to dispute this other than email — which they have ignored us for over a month now without replying to our continued requests. Trapped. Doomed. We have no further options.
I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human customer service agent can respond.
So naive. That's not how you get support in this day and age. You get support by kicking up a storm on social media.
Shout far and wide (twitter, facebook, reddit, etc) that [Big corporation] is screwing you. If you can give it some sort of spin - like racism or gender equality - all the better. Just kick up as much of a storm as you can.
I guarantee that [Big corporation] will be forced to respond.
(I say this semi-jokingly, but it is sad that this a) works, and b) that sometimes it is the only way to get their attention)
I don't know if Firebase has a reseller program, but for other cloud offers from Google, my advice is: if you want someone you can scream at, buy from a reseller instead of buying directly from Google.
Last week at thegoodfellas.com.br a disgruntled ex-employee managed to erase all their Gmail accounts and change the administrator account in order to prevent recovery. You can recover a deleted account in 5 days, but you need access to that administrator account. Unfortunately they could not recover access to the administrator account in time and lost all their G Suite data - you may blame them for their flawed firing process but shit happens and when it does a reseller can be fast enough to prevent a tragedy.
I administer a couple G Suite accounts for small business owner friends purchased direct from Google.
G Suite has incredible phone support. I've called 3-4 times over past 5 years and never waited more than 30 seconds to talk to a knowledgeable and capable tech who resolved the issue immediately. No BS troubleshooting steps, just straight to the heart of the issue.
I recall a couple Irish guys, one Eastern European and one Indian, but none with too-strong to parse accents (these were their locations -- relevant to make the point that Google clearly does have multiple live phone support centers around the world). All fully willing and capable of resolving the issue without passing me around. These weren't incredibly complex issues, but at least a couple were glitches requiring fixes on the backend (vs. mistakes on my part).
Has anyone with a G Suite account and a Cloud account ever tried contacting G Suite Support for the cloud side? Might be worth a try -- they've been helpful for me in one case where the issue wasn't strictly related to G Suite.
G Suite support from Google improved a lot, but for good reasons it is not easy to recover access to an administrator account that was modified to prevent recovery. In a case like this, how support personel can tell a legitimate customer from someone trying to gain access through social engineering?
A local reseller can pay you a visit and verify the situation but hands are tied for the friendly Kumar sitting at a helpdesk facility in India.
Here in Brazil it is even harder, because most customers are unable to communicate well in English and support in Portuguese is not done by native speakers.
> In a case like this, how support personel can tell a legitimate customer from someone trying to gain access through social engineering?
Pretty simple: opt-in KYC. Give people the option to email/fax you their passport or birth certificate or whatever, at any time after they set up their account but before the account is compromised. Extract the relevant ID numbers from the images; then store those numbers, encrypted, the same way you'd store "password recovery" info.
If the account is later compromised on their end, just ask the person attempting to do the recovery to send through the same stuff again, and compare with your recovery fields.
It's essentially the pseudo-biometric, pseudo-"something you have" equivalent of a Secret Question.
GCP sells support as a separate product. If you're a hobbyist, then that's great, as you can keep your costs lower.
If you're a business, there's no excuse not to pay Google for support. It's $150/mo; significantly higher than the $25/mo infrastructure bill the OP was discussing, but not unreasonable if you want to have a chance of guaranteeing QoS to your customers.
There NOT getting a pass ... I don't know anyone who is willing to bet their business on Google Cloud, but plenty who will do so with AWS and Azure. Google needs to replace whoever is running this section of the business with someone who can emulate what Amazon & Microsoft are doing.
Is it because so many of Google's customers would then feel obligated to also offer support or service? While it's easy to pike at Google as a huge company which should provide this level of service, where do you draw the line? As I look across the collection of services I pay for, I don't see many of them with much more than "contact us" forms on sites, and in-app, no way to contact them at all.
Is there a certain size of vendor or price point where we expect to have human support and an SLA for response?
I don't understand why the larger internet/tech community keeps giving Google a pass on this. Anything where money comes in or out should ultimately have a support line where ultimately a human customer service agent can respond.