The same thing happened to us as http://www.thinkful.com/, only it took 18 hours to come back! Customer support was hilariously useless as well: "Yes, happens to everyone." "No, there's nothing we can do about it."
For us, accounts that were forwarding mail someplace else continued to work, but anyone that had to log into Thinkful's gmail account didn't.
Customer support was hilariously useless as well: "Yes, happens to everyone." "No, there's nothing we can do about it."
The time delay is ridiculous and unacceptable, but it sounds like customer support did the most they can possibly do in that case: Engineering had implemented a (questionable) migration policy, and there are no toggles or switches that customer service can fiddle with to make it happen more quickly.
Failure to communicate up front and in advance the likelihood and nature of this... "situation", is in some ways even more unacceptable.
Many/most parties could probably cope with it reasonably well -- if they were told in advance that it would occur.
Upgrade over the weekend. Let customers know your systems will be experiencing some planned downtime. Etc.
Come on, Google. You claim to be supporting businesses. Well, act like it! Among other things, this means communicate, before the sh-t hits the fan.
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P.S. This situation isn't even asking for a dialog. Just Google's communicating some information -- what's really gonna happen -- up front.
Sometimes, your marketing needs to take a bit of a hit, for the sake of your customer.
I've little doubt that most of the engineers there respect this. We have to deal with such situations every day.
If I were particularly direct, I might suggest one of them go over to marketing with his/her "stomping" boots on, until they come to understand this point.
It is bad, yes. But compared to the experiences you get the an ISP and the crappy email services they supply. I recently complained to my ISP about slow services, and they disconnected us and turned off all services I had from the for 3 weeks (whilst trying to fix it). No emails and no phone calls. Fortunately I don't use my ISPs provided email address for anything that matters (for this reason), it was the lack of Internet that was worst. This experience cost us quite a bit of money and a mass off time. 18 hours would have been nice. Orcon. New Zealand.
I disagree – customer support doesn't start with the person on the phone with the customer, it ends there. When a company designs a process where the person on the phone isn't empowered to effect change that person is guaranteed to be useless.
That this was happening to Google, and that it occurred exactly when we tried to _pay them money_ definitely makes the situation hilarious.
It's still an "outage" if even just one user is affected. In fact, it's still an "outage" if the service is unavailable (which includes being temporarily unusable) for some period of time, and no users are actively affected by it.
Google's support is a complete joke. The only way to get things fixed in a timely manner (if at all) is to ask someone who works for Google to escalate internally. Then you stand a chance. Otherwise you're SOL.
On top of that the Gmail team routinely ignores internal feedback before rolling out new features or UI changes claiming the Googlers do not represent average users.
I would recommend the OP to contact a Googler friend if they have one.
Google's arrogance and disrespect for its users will be its undoing.
