Sad Story of My Google Workspace Account Suspension

Summary

As the title suggests, I have finally become the victim of Google’s account suspension. The reason given over the phone was that my account had been “hijacked” - when in reality, I was simply the one accessing it from overseas.Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions and continue to hold my email hostage. I understand they may believe they’re protecting me from social engineering, but a DNS verification was already completed to prove I own the domain. While suspended, no emails are received and no forwards work.On Saturday, April 4, around 5:00 AM I removed my phone number from the account. I am travelling to the UK for a short period and did not want to have roaming on my Australian phone. Despite setting up an authenticator and passkey, gmail insisted that I use my phone number to login via SMS. Ofcourse, this was not what I wanted. So I removed the recovery phone, expecting the system to fall back to my authenticator. I was in the UK to negotiate a business outcome - I should have realised that if Gmail fails, everything downstream fails with it.On Saturday, April 4, at 5:06 AM, I received a notification saying my authenticator had been removed. It hadn’t. The authenticator was still active on my phone - it was the recovery phone I had removed. Google apparently conflated the two.I had my logged-in laptop, phone, passkey, and backup codes, but none of it worked.Every recovery attempt kept hitting the same “something went wrong” dead end, despite tapping the correct recovery prompt on my phone.This email is the sole account on my Google Workspace - and the super admin account. A single point of failure. It has three aliases across different domains. Email, Drive, Calendar, payroll, and authentication for multiple services are all tied to it.I had multiple email forwards configured precisely for situations like this, but because the account is suspended, forwards don’t work either. Payroll is tomorrow. I won’t be able to run it because of my r...