Our production servers was suspended by Google Cloud

The last 24 hours has been tough. As a 4 years customer, our production servers have been suspended by Google Cloud because we didn't fill up some information on-time.

To be clear, it has been more than 24 hours and they still have not got back with a resolution. I managed to get our servers back online few hours ago with a workaround by adding a new billing account.

Why were our servers suspended? Because we didn't fill up information in time?

1) Google Cloud dropped us an email 10 days back that I missed out

2) Titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" with no indication of suspension or what in title. Basically you would have thought it was an informational email that doesn't require any action on your part.

3) Given the number of subprocessor "Important" emails they send it's too easy to miss out the email.

4) So 10 days gone by and our servers were abruptly shutdown with no suspension notification. They simply pulled the plug.

So what information are we missing?

The form can be viewed here. Basically they want us to provide identification documents. For us, we've already been paying and using the same credit card for the past 4 yrs. Only changed once when the card expire few months back but weren't told to provide any identification documents previously.

Google Cloud have zero empathy for customers

We've always pay our bills on-time for the past 4 yrs consistently spending $400-$700/mo. Our servers were suspended not because of any fradulent related issue. It was suspended simply because of "some missing paperwork" that has been delayed. Since we were told to wait 24-48 hrs for their "trust and safety" team to verify our documents, I asked the support to at least temporarily reactivate our servers given the circumstances. But the support told us they have no access to do so.

As of now, we are still waiting for them to reply. And if I haven't found a workarond, our servers would've been down for more than 24 hrs. It's beyond ridiculous how they treat the very customer who trusted them since the App Engine days. And it's obvious that their "trust and safety" team doesn't care or understand the urgentness of the matter.

Moving Forward

Starting today, I will be making plans to move everything to AWS. It will take awhile since we have tons of code to change and also commitment usage with Google Cloud. But I will never ever run any production stuffs with Google Cloud again. You can't trust them with your business.

How to get information updates for OnVoard?

In this case we weren't able to broadcast email to everyone since we use our own platform for sending emails. To get timely notifications, you can follow us on facebook or twitter.

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