For us, accounts that were forwarding mail someplace else continued to work, but anyone that had to log into Thinkful's gmail account didn't.
The time delay is ridiculous and unacceptable, but it sounds like customer support did the most they can possibly do in that case: Engineering had implemented a (questionable) migration policy, and there are no toggles or switches that customer service can fiddle with to make it happen more quickly.
Many/most parties could probably cope with it reasonably well -- if they were told in advance that it would occur.
Upgrade over the weekend. Let customers know your systems will be experiencing some planned downtime. Etc.
Come on, Google. You claim to be supporting businesses. Well, act like it! Among other things, this means communicate, before the sh-t hits the fan.
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P.S. This situation isn't even asking for a dialog. Just Google's communicating some information -- what's really gonna happen -- up front.
Sometimes, your marketing needs to take a bit of a hit, for the sake of your customer.
I've little doubt that most of the engineers there respect this. We have to deal with such situations every day.
If I were particularly direct, I might suggest one of them go over to marketing with his/her "stomping" boots on, until they come to understand this point.
That this was happening to Google, and that it occurred exactly when we tried to _pay them money_ definitely makes the situation hilarious.