At the scale at which Google operates, even if they fixed it within a minute it probably takes some time to test and roll these things out.

Sometimes I wonder if people think that infrastructure for billions of people is some sort of magic where you push the fix button and magically everything's solved across the globe.

Sure it'll take time.

Google cannot have it both ways though. They have a habit of completely restricting all ways of appealing or contesting these issues ostensibly because they think their tech is so good that it isn't required (at least in the vast majority of cases), and yet we have people permanently locked out of their personal and work GMails for months on end (or indefinitely) and now being accused of copyright infringement for the digit "1", with a bold assertion at the end of the email saying "This restriction cannot be reviewed".

Google's become so big that collapse/disruption is inevitable.

>They have a habit of completely restricting all ways of appealing or contesting these issues ostensibly because they think their tech is so good that it isn't required

Are you sure it's not just because providing them would cost money?

They'll certainly cost money. Can they afford it? Yeah, they can.

I think the issue is that Google thinks that operational scale is what defines the correct solution- even when they are not at the scale that requires the solution they are using. They seem so enamored with operating at stupidly high scale that they don't realize they actually can afford to do this right, and if they did that while being mindful of scale, they would be much harder to displace than they currently are.

Companies don't spend as much as they can afford, they spend as little as they can get away with.

I'd have more sympathy if it weren't "A review cannot be requested for this restriction." It's designed to be as brutal and draconian as possible. They chose this. It is guilty until proven innocent, with no recourse.

Sometimes I wonder if people will excuse anything Google does that hurts people and assume it is some sort of magic to not choose to do that.

That's what Goolag does for quite a long time already. Changed IP address? Goodbye mail. Know your password? Still no. Know your secret answer? They laugh at you. Out of options? Sucks to be you. We don't care if you're in a different country or having an emergency. Google is just plain evil.

"Guilty until proven innocent" implies the guilt presumption can be reversed by proving you're innocent.

I don't think this is the case here.

Nah, it's just "you're guilty, the end."

The faster the fix can roll out, the faster a breakage can also roll out. Move slower and break fewer things.

I remember interviewing at Amazon (this was 2009) and being told that any engineer could deploy to the main site at any time. The thought terrified me.

A product manager with an MBA will argue this affects only a handful of customers, mostly non-paying, so fixing it should sit at the end of the backlog.

Is that wrong? How many outraged people here are going to stop using paid-for Google products because of this? (people who didn't stop using paid-for Google products for all the times this kind of thing happened before). It's approximately none, isn't it?

The problem is that it hurts the perception of Google, particularly for enterprise customers. If the perception is that Google is unresponsive and gives customers no recourse to address obviously incorrect behavior of its automated systems, it makes it harder for enterprise customers to trust Google with their workloads.

A one off bug like this isn't the end of the world, but it fits into the larger pattern of how Google operates.

Yep, I've been in a position to choose cloud providers before, and I wouldn't touch Google with a ten foot pole (it's basically AWS or Azure in my mind).

I'm already unhappy with the level of control they already have on my life (Gmail and Android).

You can only pile straw on the camel for so long. People will tolerate small problems to a great extent, but not infinitely.

It's certainly good competitive info for Microsoft or others to share during sales calls.

It’s a broken window. Is a perfect example of the craziness of the current state and approach that even the Everyman can understand and be surprised/question/have negative sentiment about.

The MBA thinking ignoring intangibles is exactly the problem, trading short term win for long term loss. Will it actually matter in the end? Probably not and the cycle will continue..

> Is that wrong?

No, resources are scarce and should be allocated wherever offers the best returns.

But it's still lame that Google has this kind of bug, don't you think?

People will think twice before using GCP. I know I'm.

But why didn't you do that all the previous times?

- 13 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 "On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given. I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799 and it was happening often enough to be a meme then with people saying: "And this time I'd like the outcome of this thread not to be just "A Google insider wandered past and fixed this guys problem" but "Here's how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again." and "This is a general problem with Google and their customer-no-service attitude. It's just deplorable. It really is. You have to wonder: What is it going to take for them to give a shit and actually do something about it?"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217549 "Ask HN: Why doesn't Google believe in customer support?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022091 "Ask HN: How to reach _real_ people at Google?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5120060 "My Gmail account got hacked. Google won't help. I need your advice."

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851448 "Help HN: Cannot recover my Google Adsense because of single 1$ mistake"

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569902 "Ask HN: Is it possible to get help from a Google employee?(for G+)"

- 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13874778 "We accediently created a personal google account using G Suite's main account, and without any warning Google just removed all of our access to a very sensitive data for our organization."

- 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20203482 "SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help", comment: "Google really fails hard in the face of providing support when issues like this occur."

That's a quick search of "help google account" in the HN search down at the bottom of the page, just submissions not comments. Comments immediately comes up with "Xoogler here - actually we used to say "if you are not buying advertising from us, Google can't help you at all"." - joering2, two days ago.

Or this anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053549 steelframe is telling about Google "After they hung up on [a paying customer] 3 or 4 times, eventually a manager got on the phone and told him (between his screams), "Look, you're not getting any phone support because it doesn't exist. There's nowhere for us to transfer you. There's nobody who can call you back about this. Your only option is to search the forums for an answer to your problem. I am going to terminate this call now. Sir, I'm going to terminate this call. No, we can't help you. Nobody at Google can help you. I am terminating this call now. We asked you to stop calling this number. Do not call us again. <click>""

And don't forget https://killedbygoogle.com/ for products people liked which they shuttered because reasons, most commonly exemplified by Google (RSS) Reader 9 years ago which still comes up in comments present day.

Well, GOOG's share price has tripled in the last 5 years, so that's how much people are staying away from them as a result.

Happened to me a few times, lost all mail accounts (I didn't have too many) because I cannot login from old ISP IP (it probably doesn't even exist anymore). People don't realize what dystopia they're signing into until it's too late ( Android forces people to create G-accounts without real need, that's why their user base is growing. (

Basically, this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067824

I assume 99% of googlers are juggling production issues. Maybe the rest are supporting the ad platforms, as the public facing applications have been fairly static for years, aside from moving the comments on youtube to the top and bottom and back up to the top again.

I wish they would finish the thumbs down functionality in youtube music or look at WearOS once in a while (150000 one stars reviews LOL).

Some may say 'you get what you pay for', but after a few paid google gapps accounts getting locked out lately for no good reason, I'll be moving and not paying anymore after drawing a blank from support.

It only affects sharing so it isn't a disaster if this happens, probably P3 medium if you went by their bug bounty priorities.

That is what I saw, I can still access the file. I do wonder, though, if there's some threshold of flagged files where they suddenly enact some other punishment.

I'm sure that right now, competitive YouTube scam artists are sending competing channel owners files with just "1" in them, in the hope they get their Google accounts machine-deleted and their youtube channels taken down with zero recourse...

Altenatively, just the next brick laid upon the pyramid of "Google sux".