"We have senior contacts at Google who we worked with in order to regain control of the Google Apps accounts"
Boy, its nice they get that privilege. I love gmail, but god help me the day I lose access to my account- I can only imagine the support whack-a-mole us mortals would have to go through to get any resolution.
Anyone remember the "thomas monopoly" story from a while back where gmail disabled the guy for weeks with no comment and the dude had to contact every person in the world to get someone to look at it? (And then they reinstated his account)
Cloudflare isn't special. Any business (or individual) who pays for google apps gets 24/7 email and phone support. I hate this perception that google has terrible customer support. If you want support, stop being a free user.
I friend of mine got his Gmail deactivated (as you know, without any explanation or means to dispute it). With it, hundreds of purchased Android apps got lost as well. As there isn't much you can do, after a week, he created a new account and had to repurchase most of the Android apps and switch all his accounts to it. Some services require access to your old email, so, he had to recreate some of those as well.
Google having 24/7 email and phone support for google apps doesn't seem to jive with this statement in the parent:
"We have senior contacts at Google who we worked with"
Saying "senior contacts" seems to indicate that they have specific high level people that they personally know who were able to escalate beyond what the response would be for a typical user.
A potential security hole is very different from someone being locked out of their account (as annoying as that is). Most web companies by now have sound procedures in place to quickly escalate those reports.
And yes, realistically, a larger service like CloudFlare is going to get more attention than any individual. It might seem unfair to the individual, but overall, it's in everyone's interest when a situation like this arises.
Google Apps accounts are billed and offer phone support, right? I don't think there's a mechanism to upgrade/migrate free Gmail accounts to Google Apps, though.
Boy, its nice they get that privilege. I love gmail, but god help me the day I lose access to my account- I can only imagine the support whack-a-mole us mortals would have to go through to get any resolution.
Anyone remember the "thomas monopoly" story from a while back where gmail disabled the guy for weeks with no comment and the dude had to contact every person in the world to get someone to look at it? (And then they reinstated his account)