For a second I legit thought Google banned my account for some reason. And I don't like it that I feel relieved..

Underrated comment. If the government freezes your bank account, at least you can take them to court. If Google mistakenly disables your account, there does not seem to be any legal recourse. Considering the extent to which people depend on their services, perhaps there should be a more elaborate appeal process.

They can freeze the account but I own the domain so I can point it anywhere I want and I have copies locally via imap.

At this point the only reason I use it is because I grandfathered in on an old plan it's still free, if that changes I'll go elsewhere.

Google doesn't disable ordinary rulefollowing accounts by mistake. They are aware of the false positive rate and don't care.

I agree, but the problem is that "ordinary rulefollowing" is not clearly defined by Google. Perhaps it was that innocent park frisbee party video with a Metallica sound played in the background by some other party there... and not only your video, but also your YouTube account, and worse, email account gets blocked. Maybe this scenario is dystopian - the point is that it is a black-box no-appeal/limited appeal system when such an event happens.

Google account terminations typically only affect the one service. If your YouTube account gets terminated for ToS violations, your email account will still work perfectly fine.

Same for me - and then I tried logging in to gmail in an incognito window and got "Couldn't find your Google account" which really scared me.

Time to stop postponing that large Google Takeout for me!

Clicking the stupid download links is so tedious...

Thunderbird prompting me to login, and getting "Google does not recognize this email address" as a reply was a nice adrenaline spike, until I checked the status on HN!

This happened to me with a work email. For a moment I thought, "Well, I had a good run at this company.." My next thought was, "Ha, Google must be down - better check HackerNews."

I am still experiencing this problem on all my synced-to-Thunderbird Gmail accounts, so it either hasn't been completely fixed yet, or there's another ongoing issue.

I started this[1] the last time something similarly scary happened.

It's very comforting to have a local copy of everything important in situations like this one.

[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...

Yes! It takes some work to switch, but it's worth it. Buy your own domain name, and link it to an existing service if you don't want to host yourself. You'll always be able to switch your mail alias when having issues with your email host.

Our entire library of video tutorials disappeared for a while. I was not happy, and the thought of losing our email.. Currently working with the team to make backups of absolutely everything off-site and off-Google. A good wake up call for us.

https://console.cloud.google.com/ is down as well. Seems very much an identity issue.

I really should try to get my stuff moved to my new address. Not self-hosted, but a non-profit that has been around for a while... Finally paid the membership fee.