
Ask HN: Google locked me out of my primary gmail account - kuzehanka
When trying to access gmail form my pc, I got served a brand new product page with a button to sign in, rather than going straight through to inbox.<p>I hit the button, provided my password. 2fa shows up. It says it sent a code to my mobile phone, but I&#x27;m not getting one.<p>Opted to have a text message sent to my phone number with an auth code. Punch in the auth code. Page shows up &#x27;sorry, something went wrong, please try again&#x27;.
Tried again, same thing. Tried an alternative recovery method, same thing.<p>I can still access the account from my phone but the pc seems locked out of it no matter what recovery&#x2F;access option I choose because they all go to &#x27;sorry, something went wrong&#x27;.<p>Any suggestions how to get a human to help me or figure out what&#x27;s going wrong with their backend that&#x27;s causing it to spam &#x27;something went wrong&#x27;? This is insane. I&#x27;ll be migrating everything off gmail after regaining access to the account.
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ksaj
I'm glad you got this fixed up. It can easily go south from there if you
hadn't succeeded early on.

Many years ago an old gmail email address of mine was used in spam messages.
Instead of looking and seeing that those emails didn't even originate from my
account, my account was locked.

Side effects? My iPad became an expensive bookend because Apple stopped
allowing me to update my software as soon as I no longer could authenticate
with the registered account. I couldn't even reset it, since that requires
said authentication. More than a decade later, and that account remains just
as locked as the iPad...

Both companies, imho, handled this in the worst way possible.

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kuzehanka
Update: 15 minutes later, trying to log in again worked via the default device
notification method.

A scary reminder that Google is one backend screwup away form locking you out
of your digital life.

