Google Cloud Shut Down This Guy's Business — But Now He's a Fan for Life

Julie Bort | Business Insider | August 26, 2016

On Monday, Fred Trotter, CEO of a healthcare startup called DocGraph, came into work only to discover that his cloud computing provider, Google, had effectively shut down his company, sending him and his team into a panic. DocGraph, through its sister company, CareSet, sells Medicare data and analysis to help improve patient care and track the effectiveness of drugs. It not only stores its data with Google, but also relies on Google's machine learning service, Tensorflow, to help it with the analysis.

Which meant that when Google shut off access to his whole project, not just a single problematic service, he couldn't simply move his app to another cloud and start serving his customers again. But by Friday, Trotter was so impressed with Google and how the cloud team ultimately and finally handled the situation that he's sticking with them, he told Business Insider.

On Thursday, August 18, Google sent Trotter's company a warning notice in which it had said his Google cloud project appeared to be implicated in some sort of hacking attack (Google said it appeared to be involved in "intrusion attempts against a third-party,"). Google was giving the company three days to knock it off. The folks at DocGraph were flummoxed by the warning in three ways...