I sometimes get the impression that people believe Google is some kind of magnificent, competent enterprise.
Sure, they make billions of dollars every minute, but how much of that goes into making a genuinely good product for its users and how much is just the result of being literally the only product we can use?
How much of all that money is being spent offering satisfying customer support that, well, provides support when needed?
Honestly, contacting Google Support in 2025 is like living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel or a story by Franz Kafka.
It’s surreal, hard to communicate ideas clearly, and no one is helpful.
It’s like visiting hell.
Here’s how my morning went with Google and the steps I took to troubleshoot something which realistically could have been solved in 10 seconds if only it was easy to reach someone (or even prevented if they had properly sent out an email in the first place).
8:30AM. I log on to check our Google Ads account. What with Easter and all sorts of things going on, it had been about a week since I last checked things.
I wasn’t really worried initially. Apart from the odd optimizations, this account pretty much ran like clockwork.
However, the moment I log on I see the flat line of despair for the past week’s data.
Usually that means a credit card issue, but in this case, there was a little message at the top of the screen telling me that the account was deactivated.
Not paused, deactivated.
That’s weird. I assumed until then that the only way to do that was through manual action.
And apparently it happened right before the Easter weekend (lovely timing).
I checked my inbox to see if Google had notified me and I just missed it, but nope – the last message was just something about billing and not related to this.
Figuring I could just reactivate the account as it’s been far less than 30 or 90 days or whatever the time period is where they allow accounts to be recovered, I went into my settings and then preferences, only to find the following message:
This account is deactivated. Please contact support to reactivate it. — Google Ads
Okay, still strange, but not the end of the world.
I click the help button and check the first recommended topic from the ask the experts portal.The very first question is about this issue, and the answer is “immediately speak with support.”
So I click back, select other, and click my way to the options of contacting someone at Google.
It highlights and recommends that I opt for “Chat” because there was only a 1 minute wait.
So I fill in the form for chat, only to get hit with a message that “Sorry, all our agents are unavailable. Try again later.”
I try that a few times over the next couple of minutes. No change.
It still says its the recommended route with a 1 min wait time.
I turn back and try the phone option. It gives me a number.
For the briefest of moments, I’m sent back in time to the good old days of Google when you could call a number and a person would answer. And they would help you.
I dial the number and reach an automated voice system to walk me through.
It asks for my account number which I have to repeat three times.
Then it asks for the issue. I tell it, reading the issue wording from Google Ads verbatim.
It doesn’t understand. Instead it asks which sort of campaign am I having an issue with.
I repeat that it’s not a campaign. It’s an account issue.
I go through this two more times before the bot says it will transfer me to a person.
Finally, I think, as I hear the transfer complete. But instead of a person saying hello, it sounds like a cafeteria. A dozen voices buzzing, and what sounds conspicuously like pots dropping into the sink.
I ask if anyone is there and hear a distant mouse voice that sounds like there could be.
After explaining that I can’t hear anything, they try various things, each time becoming maybe 10% clearer, but still 50% quieter than the background noise.
I ask if they have a headset. Their answer:
No. — Google Rep.
Can they duck into a closet or the washroom?
They do.
I can sort of hear them now, with all the background noise now more distant. Like the way noises sound when you’re in the bathtub listening to the rest of the house.
I remind myself that I’m speaking with an official customer service agent at one of the world’s wealthiest corporations.
And yet here I am, shouting into my phone, while the volume is cranked up, trying to have a conversation with a woman in a bathroom on the far side of the planet who only has her laptop mic and speakers, just to find out how I can spend more money with Google again.
I spell out my issue and she says she will check. Puts me on hold for 7 minutes.
She comes back. Says she will escalate. Puts me on hold again as she transfers the line to the dedicated team.
I wait a few more minutes. She’s now back. Telling me sorry, no one’s there. They’ll get back to me in 1-2 business days.
I say thanks. She says she’ll send a survey after the call to ask how Google did.
There’s no survey. Not after the call, nor in my inbox.
Thankfully (or maybe finally), I get an email a few hours later from the specialist telling me the account was disabled because we didn’t switch to the new billing policy. We just gotta go through hoops to get ourselves set up on monthly invoices.
Great. Would have been nice to learn this before the account was suspended.
According to everything I read, this was supposed to have been sent by email, but I crawled every email from Google for the past 3 months and there was no email.
So yeah, I guess that’s where we are.
Arguably the world’s wealthiest and most powerful company trims costs to the point that they can’t give noise cancelling headsets to their unlucky support staff in India.
Moments like these make me realize the antitrust suits looking to break up Google’s monopoly couldn’t come sooner.
Maybe if we had, I don’t know, some competition in the paid ads market, we might see innovations like different competitors trying to offer us reasons to stick with them.
As opposed to just accepting the enshitification of everything we once loved.
