Our digital lives are incredibly fragile

Yesterday morning, I noticed my Google Chrome profile stopped syncing. I tried to sign back in, was prompted through several rounds of re-authentication (strange, since I was already signed in), and then got this:

It took me a moment to understand what had happened. My Google account, more than 20 years old, had been disabled because it “might have been created with a computer program or bot”?!

Email, photos, files, calendar. Gone. I submitted an appeal. It was a simple form. I got an auto-response saying it would be reviewed, and then I just sat there, not sure what to do. I use Google Calendar religiously for my personal plans and suddenly couldn’t even tell what I had coming up over the weekend.

I’ve always known how fragile our digital lives are when they depend on a few massive companies. We hear these stories all the time, like the Apple developer who lost everything after redeeming a compromised gift card. I’d even taken precautions. My 200GB photo library is synced to multiple locations I control, offsite from Google Photos.

But I hadn’t considered what it means to not own my email address. As soon as Google disabled my account, emails to my address started hard bouncing. Not queued, not held. Bounced. I still have no idea what I missed.

That’s terrifying when email is the backbone of our digital identity. It’s not just for communication. It’s how we authenticate, how we recover accounts, how services verify we exist. Every service assumes you have access to your email. I knew all of this, but I naively assumed my Google account would always be there. It’s Google. What a mistake.

I spent hours migrating my critical accounts to an email address on a domain I own. Some services wouldn’t even let me change my email without verifying a code sent to my old address, which I obviously couldn’t access. Never mind that I’d already authenticated with two-factor. But that’s exactly the point: email is too important to leave in someone else’s hands. With my own domain, if a provider goes down, I can reroute my mail somewhere else.

Thankfully, about 12 hours after I submitted my appeal, my Google account was restored. No explanation, no apology, despite locking me out of services I pay for: YouTube Premium, Google AI, and more. And because emails had been bouncing during the outage, some services are now temporarily unable to deliver to me at all. Lovely.

Think carefully about your digital presence and how disruptive it would be if you suddenly lost access to a key account. Consider what important data (emails, photos, files, etc.) you have and make sure you have copies backed up outside of the accounts they live in. Google Takeout is great for this. Using your own domain for email isn’t for everyone, but for those who are technically inclined and cringing after reading this post, it can de-risk these situations immensely.

There will always be some unavoidable risk, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it could never happen to you. It can. And when it does, you’re unfortunately at the mercy of opaque processes at massive companies with very little human interaction. There is something wrong about how this all works now, but I’m not sure what the solution is.