With phone numbers, you can move from one carrier to another, while retaining your number. This helps with competition.

We need the same for email.

Sure, it may not work with the ancillary services, but keeping your email address would solve a lot of issues.

These kind of stories led me to explore de-googling my digital life. And honestly its been a fun journey and given meaning and purpose to my homelab. 100% recommend. Own your digital life, run local, reclaim the web.

Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account instead of IAM users.

In my experience Google Workspave support is very good. I’ve always been able to get a knowledgeable person on a call to debug issues without much difficulty.

But yea, if you’re locked out of your admin account, that’s another story. Very sjmilar to if you get locked out of your AWS root account. It’s a nightmare to recover.

Just had to fix an AWS account lock out this morning. Why? Despite having a $0 balance and payment info on file, until I set a budget (a new feature per their UI), all of my Cloudfront-hosted files were just unavailable on my business' site (I Cloudfront all static assets so all images, fonts, etc were just broken all of a sudden).

These are the limits of scale. Too big, too complex, and not enough skilled people to maintain and/or support it. And our hubris as humans prevents us from accepting it. Why? Why can't we accept smaller but more functional things/systems?

We don't have to live like this.

I discovered this same issue, you are required to have a phone their auth system is bugged me.

I just set up google workspace and I didn't have recovery phone or anything,just password and recovery email. I didn't login for 1 week (life stuff). When I came back it allowed me to login but didn't allow any admin stuff saying it didn't recognize me and that I must use a known browser.

Well, that was the only browser I logged in with.

The solution was a weird thing where I was able to add phone recovery and authenticator, but then had to wait 2 weeks (couldn't use it). After that I performed authentication as usual.

It's horrible.

Been there done that, none of it works, till this date my YouTube account is suspended and they can't do a thing about it.

Google Drive & Workspace are their most poorly designed products with the shittiest support ecosystem. Google would rather bleed money than work on it.

That's one of reason I started DoShare Personal Cloud[₁]

[1] https://getcloud.doshare.me

At least he owns his own domain and can eventually switch over. A few years ago we decided to switch our personal emails from gmail accounts to domains we own (though the email is still handled by google.) This way if we ever lose our google account, we can switch the MX and be able to get all our recovery emails, bank second factors, password recoveries, etc.

Run your own email server, and give Google the middle finger. Letting Google own your email, and freely spy on your communications is insane. I think this incident clearly demonstrates that you cannot leave critical infrastructure like this in the hands of a third party.

The 40+ hour window with no human contact is the part that hurts most. Small things that would be fixable with a 5-minute call compound fast when payroll is missing. Do team members still have access to their individual accounts during the suspension, or is everyone locked out?