I have been using the two factor authentication for Google for quite some time and have never had any issues. I have it turned on for both my personal Google account as well as for my Wellesley account. On the latter one, it is of limited use because of our own use of single sign on. I experienced a real panic this morning that was an eye opener for me.

All began with me getting excited about a Chrome extension called Spaces for Chrome. Since I am big user of spaces on Mac OS, I got all excited about using this. I typically have 20-25 tabs open in my Chrome browser and I hate restarting it. Since this Chrome extension seemed to address grouping of the tabs as well as CPU/Memory savings, I thought I would try it out. I installed and happily reorganized my tabs based on some themes. Then I noticed that the Calendar extension had a red X on it. It said I needed to reauthenticate. So I did. Since I have set up two factor authentication, I was sent a code and everything seemed OK. But then, the red X came back. Disclaimer: I have no proof that it is this chrome extension that caused the problem. It is just an assumption!

I went to look at Chrome settings and it had an authentication failure. I reauthenticated, got the code on my cell phone and everything was fine again. Except… (more…)