![\"\"](\"https:\/\/xwaretech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/autosuspend.png\")
<\/p>\nThis is what happens when you trust Google to run core elements of your business and that trust is violated. It’s what happens when a company becomes so large and makes so much of its money from one service that they disregard other paid services. So much of our digital life is built around email and increasingly other associated Google products like Google Drive and Google Docs.<\/p>\n
So what happens when locked out from all of this? Obviously it becomes very hard to do business. This is currently the case for one of our clients. A local electrician keeps his quotes, emails, and invoices all in Google Drive and Docs. He’s stuck, yesterday he reported that he couldn’t even go into work due to the issue. Problems started for him on Sunday and it is now approaching Friday: 5 days without access to his account.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We received a call from our client on Monday. He had been having trouble logging in on Sunday but was hoping to resolve it himself. We are resellers so we have access to a panel that lets us reset customer passwords and usually unlock the accounts if they were suspended for too many failed logins. For whatever reason, our client’s account was automatically suspended but did not give us the option to unsuspend it. Over the course of the past week, support was only able to say it’s likely due to their password being compromised. Fine, we should be able to reset it, show them how to setup 2FA, and move on with our business.<\/p>\n
That is not how things went.<\/p>\n
Google Suite has a support button where you can be connected to a support technician by phone. This support is tied to domains by a PIN. Support makes no distinction that we are in the Partner program and have a dozen or so domains under management. So we have to provide a second PIN when we call in. Phone support couldn’t help at all, but opened an email ticket. This ticket was answered a little over 12 hours later<\/strong> by a support technician requesting we fill out a form to receive a new ticket number. At this point, it was after 12AM but I pushed on knowing our client was facing increasing pressure to get his account re-enabled. Eventually after a flurry of emails with support mostly confused by there being two open tickets in the system, we were asked to perform a CNAME validation. I couldn’t do this until my client was awake around 8AM the next morning.<\/p>\n Support didn’t respond to us during our regular business hours after we made the CNAME change. We poked a few times over the day via email. Over 20 hours went by until we received the next response. Here it is:<\/p>\n I will admit it was at this point I finally started to lose my cool. Password recovery can take up to 48 hours typically as it filters through support at large companies, but this delay is unreal. Every interaction I have with their support I get a different estimate. When I brought up our SLA agreement on the phone, they explicitly stated that it would not apply and they would not be issuing a service credit for this period of inaccessibility.<\/p>\n After requesting that I add a second CNAME record two days after the first was completed, I was finally sent a list of questions to fill out:<\/p>\n Take a look at it. Notice the second two sections? That’s not how things work for a reseller. We are billed directly by Google for all the domains we have management of, then our clients get billed for that through us. Google doesn’t handle your payment information when you use Google Apps with us. Regardless, I answered all the questions and attached our reseller invoice as proof (at around 3AM). I then went to sleep for a few hours. This is what I woke up to:<\/p>\n So, we resubmitted that and are now waiting some more. I’m hoping that maybe around midnight we’ll have a resolution, but I’m not very optimistic.<\/p>\n It has truly been a difficult week. As I write this post I’m averaging just over 4 hours of sleep per night. As of right now, 26 emails have been exchanged between me and their support. What is supposed to be the correct support department only seems to respond to their emails between the hours of 12AM and 5AM EST. We’ve logged a total of 2 phone calls, performed 2 DNS CNAME verifications (support demanded we do another last night), reached out to 3 acquaintances that work at Google, and filled out a ‘knowledge test’ questionnaire twice.<\/p>\n All of this and it still feels like we’re at square one. We are suffering real time and monetary losses in lost opportunity (I had to postpone a client initial consult today, for instance) and our client is potentially losing thousands of dollars per day being entirely unable to work while this account is suspended. Considering this has taken up a week of my time now, I can safely estimate that our GSuite profit margin is gone for the year.<\/p>\nA Entire Day Passes<\/h3>\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/xwaretech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/photo_2018-03-01_16-23-57.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Knowledge Test<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/xwaretech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/THE-KNOWLEDGE-TEST.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/xwaretech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/google-reading-fail.png\")
<\/p>\nTo Summarize The Issue<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/xwaretech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/more_lies.png\")
<\/p>\n