For those who are not aware of the incident, if you are not located in United States, and you click the “Upgrade your account” in the Google Voice dashboard, you will get the error message ”Google Voice is not available in your country”.

From then on, you won’t be able to get to the Google voice dashboard or add credit to your Gmail CallPhone. Effectively, you are locked out from using the call services. Luckily there is an easy way to fix this. All we need to do is to change our machine to an USA IP address and login to Google voice to cancel the upgrade. Here’s the steps:

In Windows/Mac:

  1. Download and install Hotspot shield.
  2. Run Hotspot shield
  3. Open your browser and login to your Gmail account
  4. Open another tab and go to https://www.google.com/voice/. Instead of the “Google Voice Unavailable” error message, you will now be prompted to setup Google voice. We are not going to setup Google Voice since it is not available outside of USA yet, so what you need to do now is to click on the link “Cancel Your Upgrade”.

That’s it. Your account is unlocked. You can access your Google voice dashboard and add credit to your account.

In Linux

Since Hotspot Shield is not available for Linux, we have to use alternative method to connect to USA IP address. One of the alternative is to connect to a remote IP using SSH. Once you are connected to the remote address, you can follow the same steps above to cancel your upgrade. Does this method works for you? Let us know if you know of other ways to connect to a US IP address.