Comment by dmitrygr
3 years ago
Same thing happened to me: “suspended, need extra verification” after YEARS of the account existing just fine. Nothing helped. Not doing what they asked (multiple photos of photo id), not emailing, nor calling support.
I ended up calling an ex-coworker who still worked at google. He sent an internal email. It was resolved the same day. I never found out what the issue was.
Don’t use google for anything you care about, unless you maintain close friendships with googlers.
That doesn't always work, (following anecdote is not about google cloud): someone I know lives in a street that's egregiously and very obviously broken on google maps (whole network of streets mapped with the same name, private pathways mapped as public streets, whole bunch of repeated door numbers, etc) and since everyone trusts google maps for everything this has caused a bunch of serious issues for the person as they interact with businesses and even government. Any attempts to get this fixed through the normal process get ignored (I have personally tried, several years ago, twice).
Over the years I asked two different friends at Google for help, one of whom was management. They were baffled when the internal message thing yielded no results either. There doesn't seem to be any process for getting certain types of issues resolved at google.
My point is that google can ruin people's lives even if the victims aren't the ones using it. Gmail blocking inbound mail is another example - if gmail decides to block your service, everyone will blame you, and there's nothing you can do about it other than wait.