I had the same frustrating "we are suspending your account but we refuse to explain why, have a nice day" crap from Azure.. anyone who depends on mission critical stuff from these services needs their heads read.
In my experience performance per dollar they suck compared to the other clouds, uptime per dollar they suck compared to the other clouds, and while you can talk to someone at Azure support you'd rather talk to a bot most of the time.
My takeaway from stuff like this is don't use the big clouds unless you're big enough to get proper customer service. It's too risky. Especially when you can get false flagged by AI or some heuristic.
If you have to use GCP, it's probably safer to go through a third party reseller than being a customer directly. Those resellers are big enough to get customer service.
The whole "Please verify information only available to you when you login to re-enable your login" is such a malicious pattern I've run into google in a ton of different services. Other companies do similar, but it's just such a blatant fuck you I find it hard to believe someone seriously sat down and thought it was a good idea.
I had it once where a service I was using for google got mysteriously suspended, but that didn't stop them from charging the card for months. Since I couldn't get back in to cancel, I ended up having to completely suspend the card. That's the kind of behavior scammy porn sites do. You wouldnt necessarily expect it from a multi trillion $ hyperscaler.
eBay/Paypal were one of the worst when they were merged. It was so bad I wound up having a new account every 6 months or so. I learned that when they started asking for personal details your chances of being reinstated were nearly zero. The lesson was I had an acct suspended, and they asked for DL, then birth certificate, then a lease, then a power bill, then a phone bill, every time I gave them the document they asked for something else. Then finally they said they needed my passport. I said I didn't have one, suddenly THAT was the only thing that could solve this, and I understood that this was just the plan. They keep asking for different things until you can't provide it or the info they have is wrong and they'll never believe you.
This happened to me in college. They never refunded my $7k balance. It was devastating to me at the time. The experience has played no small role in me becoming a cryptocurrency believer and advocate for the unbanked.
Very similar thing happened to me with LinkedIn earlier this year. Account disappeared, never given a reason - I only used it to interact with job listings.
Isn't their business model largely centered around the concept of scaling up business without scaling up staff proportionately? A big part of their innovation was getting people to tolerate nonexistent/automated customer service.
Customer service would not have to be a cost center for large clouds. I think many people would be glad to have an option to pay $100 to speak to a real person.
If they were only an enterprise cloud company I think they'd see it that way. But having no customer service for any of their consumer services has become the DNA of the whole company.
I develop apps for both iOS and Android and while iOS does need a yearly membership, at least any time my app or update is rejected, I am able to interact with actual humans to have the issue resolved. On Google play store, it's just bots to deal with.
The Register version* is missing one of the worst parts --- this is with active engagement from support, each time. And the automated system(s) kept doing their thing on multiple levels - not just re-suspending the same account for the same reason.
Only pointing it out because that shook me: for years I've been thinking "if only there was active support" or "if only they could flag 'this account is getting screwed by mistake, take no automated action'...and both of those things were there, and that doesn't even help. The flaw is so fundamental :\
More importantly it never actually explained the reasons. A message stating only that “you violated the terms of service” is not a “reason”. In a just world, such a vague reason would be illegal.
I had it once where a service I was using for google got mysteriously suspended, but that didn't stop them from charging the card for months. Since I couldn't get back in to cancel, I ended up having to completely suspend the card. That's the kind of behavior scammy porn sites do. You wouldnt necessarily expect it from a multi trillion $ hyperscaler.
Only pointing it out because that shook me: for years I've been thinking "if only there was active support" or "if only they could flag 'this account is getting screwed by mistake, take no automated action'...and both of those things were there, and that doesn't even help. The flaw is so fundamental :\
* discussion yesterday, on author's original blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827