Sad Story Of My Google Workspace account suspension

As the title suggests, I have finally become the victim of Google’s account suspension. The reason given over the phone was that my account had been “hijacked” - when in reality, I was simply the one accessing it from overseas.

Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions and continue to hold my email hostage. I understand they may believe they’re protecting me from social engineering, but a DNS verification was already completed to prove I own the domain. While suspended, no emails are received and no forwards work.

On Saturday, April 4, around 5:00 AM I removed my phone number from the account. I am travelling to the UK for a short period and did not want to have roaming on my Australian phone. Despite setting up an authenticator and passkey, gmail insisted that I use my phone number to login via SMS. Ofcourse, this was not what I wanted. So I removed the recovery phone, expecting the system to fall back to my authenticator. I was in the UK to negotiate a business outcome - I should have realised that if Gmail fails, everything downstream fails with it.

On Saturday, April 4, at 5:06 AM, I received a notification saying my authenticator had been removed. It hadn’t. The authenticator was still active on my phone - it was the recovery phone I had removed. Google apparently conflated the two.

I had my logged-in laptop, phone, passkey, and backup codes, but none of it worked.

Every recovery attempt kept hitting the same “something went wrong” dead end, despite tapping the correct recovery prompt on my phone.

This email is the sole account on my Google Workspace - and the super admin account. A single point of failure. It has three aliases across different domains. Email, Drive, Calendar, payroll, and authentication for multiple services are all tied to it.

I had multiple email forwards configured precisely for situations like this, but because the account is suspended, forwards don’t work either. Payroll is tomorrow. I won’t be able to run it because of my reliance on Gmail-based authentication. I cannot login to Pipedrive - sales CRM because I use Google Auth. I can’t login to our Task management app. I can’t login to our internal systems because - you guessed it - it releied on Google Oauth.

Then, it get worse.

I tried account recovery and was asked to verify DNS ownership via CNAME and TXT records. I did this promptly. Meanwhile, the recovery email option told me I’d need to wait 30 days.

Thirty days of a suspended business email. No incoming mail. No forwards. Nothing.

So Google will suspend my email for 30 days and no emails will be received during this time.

Fortunately, I run another Google Workspace account. I logged into that admin console and contacted Google support through it. The rep told me to fill out a form at a link - which required me to log in. With my suspended account. Which I obviously can’t do.

Another rep on chat told me the account was “simply suspended” and that I could recover it in incognito mode. I told them I’d already tried this multiple times and hit the same error every time. They filed another ticket.

I tell them - I have already done this numerous times and it fails with the same error I got previously.

This back-and-forth repeated several times over 24 hours. There are now four open cases. None of the case managers seem to know what’s happening - one case gets closed in favour of another, then reopened because the other was closed.

I read community forums and reach out Google Workspace on X.com. They ask for case numbers which I promptly give and they tell me to wait.

I finally reached someone by phone and explained that I had removed the phone number myself. I asked them to verify the DNS record, confirmed I’d passed their “knowledge test.” They said everything checked out and that there would be a resolution within a few hours. They confirmed as much in a follow-up email.

More than 40 hours have passed. Having chatted to someone on the phone. I’ve since been told the person handling my case isn’t on shift for another 90 minutes. This means I will likely miss payroll. A negotiation with a business associate will need to be rescheduled. I could give them my personal email, but I’d rather keep business and personal separate.

Update 1 - I know I can simply change the MX record to someone else but It has its own challenges.

Update 2 - Sadly, its 2 PM in the UK and I will miss the meeting that I had scheduled via Google Meet because emails are not working and neither is anything Google. I have been on chat with Google reps since the morning. First an update was promised in 1-2 hours. Then on followup , 3 hours later another update is promised in 90 mins as the reps shift hasn’t started. Then 90 mins later, received a call where another update is promised in 60 mins.

Upadte 3 - I have finally been able to log in. Someone very kind from Google reached out and they were able to help me login with the help of another kind person at Google. Thank you, kind stranger !

Some people on HN are noting that I tripped all red flags I could - namely 1) Changed country 2) Didn’t want to use roaming 3) Removed recovery phone. 4) Didn’t just change MX records. Some are saying I did not consider the dependency tree.

To clarify, I removed the phone number 6 days after changing the country until which point I was using this email just fine with the same IP address in the new country. I could have just changed the MX to fastmail or Protonmail but that would not have retroactively gotten me my old emails or my calendar invites. Not to mention the Oauth login issues I might faced logging into other services.

I also did not realise that the account was actually suspended/disabled until the next day at which point I tested sending a test email only to discover no emails were being forwarded.

I had authenticator via Google app setup for 2FA , had a passkey on my laptop, was logged in on my phone, had access to backup codes, was using the same mobile phone, same laptop, had access to the recovery email and also had access to the Australian number which I removed. None of this worked.