Question: When it comes to databases, we want to leave managing them to the pros, which is why we went for a managed solution in the form of a CloudSQL 2nd gen db instance. Today the instance stopped responding, I clicked restart, it has been restarting for hours and is not responding, I have tried clone the instance, also not responding.

I don't know what else to do, our db is crippled and the service that uses it is down. These things happen, fine.

The thing that shocked me is that I am unable to contact anybody to resolve this problem. I understand that I can pay for a support subscription, $150p/m and up. This confuses me though, the GCloud console UI is not responding, am I incorrect in assuming I should not have to pay for support for the core product to at least work?

This leads me to my main question, **if I want to continue using Google Cloud products in production, do I NEED a support subscription?**

Answer: 
Same happened to us yesterday. The cloud SQL instance did not respond for an hour and a half (from 18h to 19:30h GTM+1).

We couldn't do absolutely nothing, we tried to backup the instance to a bucket but the command was returning an error saying that another operation is in progress.

We are a small startup and we can't pay for a support plan, but when we hired the cloud SQL service we thought that this kind of situations doesn't happen.

**Honestly, after this I believe that Cloud SQL is not a good option if you do not contract at the same time a gold or platinum support plan.** It is frustrating that something fails and you can not do anything, or even report the error.
You can get [free or premium support here](https://cloud.google.com/support/). You do not need a subscription to get help; it all depends on your needs and the level of urgency you estimate for eventual future problems. 

If you have a recent backup of your database, you may consider re-creating it in another instance, from there. 

You may consider posting your issue in the G[oogle Cloud SQL Product Issue Tracker](https://code.google.com/p/googlecloudsql/issues/list). This way, it will enjoy much better visibility from developers and Google support, without attracting any extra costs.