Not FUD, putting your eggs in the Google basket "considered harmful" - unless you pay (Gmail for your domain). I had a similar lockout but on my paid account, got fixed in about 48h. It's happened to like 10 other folk I know over the last 2-3 years

I don't know if it's FUD, but it's true. It happened to a person I know, and in her case, the resolution was "ask around until a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend works at Google".

She literally had to ask her friend, who asked me, I asked one of my friends to ask one of his friends who works at Google to put in an internal ticket. It was thankfully resolved quickly (she lost access to all her work materials), but the process is insane.

Use your own domain with Fastmail. Yesterday.

Indeed, I only consider myself tangentially in the tech world, but I do have access to a private facebook group with many old co-workers and sometimes this sort of request will go out to current FB or Googlers. Inevitably some will complain that it's inappropriate and should go through official channels and others will point out that this back channel is often the only real resolution.

Google now have support, including phone and chat, via Google One ( basically if you pay for extra storage for Gmail/GDrive/Photos/etc.).

Interesting, I wonder if you can somehow pay after you're locked out.

> It was thankfully resolved quickly (she lost access to all her work materials),

More than your own domain, BACKUPS.