Railway (PaaS) global outage

https://status.railway.com

by TealMyEal • 5 months ago

86 69 5 months ago

status.railway.com

jedbrooke• 5 months ago

Oof, off topic but the trains were out of service here for my commute last night so I though from the headline this meant that somehow all trains everywhere just stopped working. Glad to see it’s just some Saas product that’s down

Gravityloss• 5 months ago

Indeed! Remote bricking of trains is perhaps a thing: https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-softw...

esseph2• 5 months ago

It's also mandated by Congress in the US, it's called PTC. (Remote control)

jasoncartwright• 5 months ago

PaaS

et-al• 5 months ago

I thought this was about a global outage regarding actual trains, but it looks like Railway is a Heroku replacement.

lysace• 5 months ago

Any news is good marketing if you're unknown.

locknitpicker• 5 months ago

Is anyone expected to know what railway.com is?

huydotnet2• 5 months ago

Context: This is Railway the PaaS company, not your daily commute vehicle (which is good in general, still bad for many users, like me).

TealMyEal2• 5 months ago

Yeah, i probs should have made that clear

ratorx• 5 months ago

A global train outage would be quite a spectacle, is that even possible?

colesantiago2• 5 months ago

What is this 'railway'?

I am assuming that a domain like railway.com should be about trains.

Why does every tech company have to name themselves as a one word .com website and what they do is unrelated and vague to their own name?

Does every tech company think they are Apple and have to register every word in the dictionary and redefine it as a technology company?

Really bad name for a company.

thornewolf• 5 months ago

dispell the hate from your heart

colesantiago2• 5 months ago

Questioning things is not 'hate' Mr Wolf.

blibble• 5 months ago

could be worse

could be called "entire" (https://entire.io/)

imiric2• 5 months ago

Worse would be x.com.

vimda• 5 months ago

You don't think "railway" at least conjures ideas about the company? It's not some random word. Not every company needs to be "helps you ship software quickly inc"

normie3000• 5 months ago

Does every tech company think they are Apple and have to register every word in the dictionary and redefine it as a technology company?

Netflix?

Liftyee• 5 months ago

Possible empirical justification: Non-tech and more "typical" orgs (train companies...) don't spend lots of money on slick-sounding one-word .com domains.

lbrito• 5 months ago

A lot of companies have been doing that for a long time

Lotus

Jaguar

Caterpillar

Shell

its a human thing

caseyohara• 5 months ago

Shell was originally very literal though. They sold seashells.

The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted, and his brother Samuel Samuel. Their father had owned an antique company in Houndsditch, London, which expanded in 1833 to import and sell seashells, after which the company "Shell" took its name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_plc

searls• 5 months ago

lol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.

zachrip2• 5 months ago

I've been using railway a while now, and I've basically never paid them but I would. It's even better than heroku. Super easy to use.

linhns• 5 months ago

Their 5$ monthly has been far more than enough for me to host my demos.

ZoneZealot• 5 months ago

That's a big yikes just after promoting themselves in the Jmail thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966562

Of course every service will have outages, it's just funny to see it so soon after saying:

We're nuts for studying failure at the company [...]

(albeit a different 'failure' context)

tonyhb• 5 months ago

IDK, it looks like servers were up, connectivity worked well, and some builds were failing. Wouldn't call that a big issue, and the same thing was happening with Vercel due to their git clones etc. yesterday too.

IOW, doesnt look as bad as the title suggests?

huydotnet2• 5 months ago

Joke about train line aside, I think Railway fits right in the spot that Heroku left.

They have a nice UI, support deploy any kind of backend-involved apps as long as it can be built into a docker container. While many PaaS out there seems to prioritize frontend only apps.

And they have a free plan, so people can just quickly deploy some POC before decide if it's good to move on.

Anyone know if there is any other PaaS that come with a low cost starter plan like this (a side from paying for a VPS)?

Tankenstein• 5 months ago

Render.com has a similar value proposition. I’ve used them and am pretty happy. Railway seems to have more bundled observability built in, that i’d like in render.

mstank• 5 months ago

VPS + Dokploy gives you just as much functionality with an additional performance boost. Hostinger has great prices and a one-click setup. Good for dozens of small projects.

dabbz• 5 months ago

+1 for dokploy, it's very flexible and allows me to setup my sites how I need. Especially as it concerns to the way I setup a static landing page, then /app goes to the react app. And /auth goes to a separate auth service, etc.

czhu122• 5 months ago

Been building an open source version of railway at https://canine.sh. Offers all the same features without the potential of a vendor lock-in / price gouging.

Onavo• 5 months ago

The docs seem to be non existent. Is the canine yaml documented?

You want docs like this:

https://coolify.io/docs/applications/ci-cd/github/setup-app

https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/dockerfile

https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/overview

Plenty of screenshots and exact step by step instructions. Throwing an "example git repo" with no documentation won't get you any users.

Put your shoes into that of a Heroku/Vercel user. DevOps is usually Somebody Else's Problem. They are not going to spend hours debugging kubernetes so if you want to sell them a PaaS built on Kubernetes, it has to be fool proof. Coolify is an excellent example, the underlying engineering is average at best (from a pure engineering point of view it's a very heavy app that suffers from frequent memory leaks, they have a new v5 rewrite but it's been stuck for 2 years) but the UI/UX has been polished very well.

imiric2• 5 months ago

Computing is getting cheaper

Heh.

Looks like a great product, although maybe mention some honest reasons to not use it, instead of the passive-aggressive marketing ones.

ktaraszk• 5 months ago

Yes, have you seen miget.com by any chance? You can start with the free tier, and can have a backend with a database for free (256Mi plan). If you need more, just upgrade. They redefined cloud billing. Worth checking.

vcanales• 5 months ago

I use https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify on a VPS for this.

zachrip2• 5 months ago

I actually think the title is misleading. I'm not sure actual existing deployments are affected? Seemingly just new ones are not working?

TealMyEal2• 5 months ago

it seemed to have been all deployments that had a browser facing interface. id say some cloudflair DNS config messup

justjake3• 5 months ago

Railway founder here. <3%.

That said, we treat this exigently seriously!

Any downtime is unacceptable and we'll have a post mortem up in the next couple hours

jszymborski• 5 months ago

Does anyone know if Railway operates its own cloud or if it's running off AWS/GCP/Azure/etc...

jsheard• 5 months ago

They were originally a GCP wrapper but they started colo'ing their own racks about a year ago.

https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one

autonomousErwin• 5 months ago

I think it has it's own "metal" services they're migrating customers to. Afaik they used GCP for "legacy" cloud services.

spollo• 5 months ago

All of these services are bundling the underlying AWS/GCP/etc resources in an easier to use package.

railway-rahul• 5 months ago

This is actually not true for us at Railway. It's our own metal.

vintagedave5• 5 months ago

Multiple services are receiving SIGTERM or shutdown signals. See dozens of support messages here: https://station.railway.com/questions/services-down-799f7bc1

Here's a sample log entry:

2026-02-11T14:35:11.916787622Z [err] 2026/02/11 14:35:03 [notice] 1#1: signal 15 (SIGTERM) received, exiting

I've had about one third of my Railway services affected. I had no notification from Railway, and logging in showed each affected service as 'Online', even though it had been shut down.

I'm pretty annoyed. I am hosting some key sites on Railway. This is not their first outage recently, and one time a couple of months ago was just as I was about to give our company owner a demo of the live product.

ndneighbor3• 5 months ago

Hey there Dave, Angelo from Railway here-

First off, super duper sorry. It's sometimes a good/bad thing if I can remember someones handle. ...and I specifically remember the support thread where we did have an outage before your demo :| - the number one goal for us is to deliver a great product. Number two is that we should never embarrass a user, outages do exactly that.

We just wrapped up the post mortem and that'll be published soon where it explains why the dashboard was reporting the state of the application incorrectly and would be more than happy to credit you for the impact to keep your business. That said, totally understand if two is way too much impact for your services.

vintagedave5• 5 months ago

Thanks Angelo. I actually have three accounts on Railway (personal, and two business.) That one you remember is (it's still there) on my personal account, where I was hoping to show why Railway was so good and we should use get a Pro account. We have not yet done so.

I'm not an expert Railway user, but I have used it since close to the beginning and have thought of myself as a fan of the product. Sometimes it's the people who cheerlead who can be most annoyed when they're let down.

I'm grateful for the reply here, by you and by other Railway staff. Although a tad unhappy, I hope I've remained courteous and clear in all communication, here and in support forums, and I also want to commend you and other Railway staff on your communication. It's been clear and open. I replied to another person saying it was a good way to rebuild trust, and it is -- I have moved from the 'annoyed and looking for alternatives' stage to the 'maybe this can be moved past' stage. In your internal learnings re your retrospective / post-mortem, add something about public communication here as a positive thing, please. I do genuinely think you've all done a good job there.

jpcompartir2• 5 months ago

This is great, not 10 minutes before this outage did I present Railway as a viable option for some small-scale hosting for prototypes and non-critical apps as an alternative to the Cloud giants

ezekg• 5 months ago

It always happens that way. I guarantee some people migrated from Heroku to Railway and bragged about future stability to the team, only to experience this.

jpcompartir2• 5 months ago

Yeah 100%

This won't change my decision, but it is still impeccable timing

justjake3• 5 months ago

Hello! Railway founder here

We'll have a post mortem for this one as we always write post mortems for anything that affects users

Our initial investigation reveals this affects <3% of instances

Apologies from myself + the Team. Any amount of downtime is completely unacceptable

You may monitor this incident here: https://status.railway.com/cmli5y9xt056zsdts5ngslbmp

vintagedave5• 5 months ago

Hi Jake. Appreciate your presence here on HN.

This affected a seemingly random set of services across three of my accounts (pro and hobby, depending on if this is for work or just myself.) That ranges from Wordpress to static site hosting to a custom Python server. All of the deployments showed as Online, even after receiving a SIGTERM.

While 3% is 'good', that's an awfully wide range of things across multiple accounts for me, so it doesn't feel like 3% ;) Please publish the post mortem. I am a big fan of Railway but have really struggled with the amount of issues recently. You don't want to get Github's growing rep. Some people are already requesting I move one key service away, since this is not the first issue.

Finally, can I make a request re communication:

If you are experiencing issues with your deployment, please attempt a re-deploy.

Why can't Railway restart or redeploy any affected service? This _sounds_ like you're requiring 3% of your users to manually fix the issue. I don't know if that's a communication problem or the actual solution, but I certainly had to do it manually, server by server.

justjake3• 5 months ago

Totally! People who see the impact will likely see more impacted than say, 3% of their services. Not all disruption created equal.

We rolled out a change to update our fraud model, and that uses workload fingerprinting

Since, in all likelyhood, your projects are similarly structured, there will be more impacted workloads if the shape of your workloads was in the "false positive" set

Will have more information soon but very valid (and astute) feelings!

port3000• 5 months ago

Second complete outage on railway in 2 months for us (there was also a total outage on December 16th), and many issues with stuck builds and other minor issues in the months before that.

Looking to move. It's a bit of hassle to setup coolify and Hetzner but I have lost all trust.

iJohnDoe4• 5 months ago

Many questions on their forum are similar to our situation. People wondering if they should restart their containers to get things working again. Worried about if they should do anything, risk losing data if they do anything, or just give everything more time.

iJohnDoe4• 5 months ago

Lots of concerns about doing a Restart or Redeploy since a lot of people are still offline 4+ hours.

Since there hasn't been any responses on the official support forum, maybe this will help someone.

I did a backup of our deployment first and did a Restart (not a Redeploy). Our service came back up thankfully.

Obviously do your own safety check about persistent volumes and databases first.

suladead• 5 months ago

Again? ffs

iJohnDoe4• 5 months ago

Affected by the outage since about 6:15 AM PT this morning. We're still down as of 9:00 AM PT.

Our existing containers were in a failure state and are now are in a partial failure state. Containers are running, but underlying storage/database is offline.

I'm glad Railway updated their status page, but more details need to be posted so everyone knows what to do now.

Everyone has outages, it's the way of life and technology. Communication with your customers always makes it less painful and people remember good communication and not the outage. Railway, let's start hearing more communication. Forum is having problems as well. Thanks.

ndneighbor3• 5 months ago

(Angelo from Railway here)

Heard. Being transparent, usually the delay on ack is us trying to determine and correlate the issue. We have a post mortem going out but we note that first report was in our system 10 minutes before it was acked, to which the platform team was trying to see which layer the impact was at.

That said, this is maybe concern #1 of the support team. Where we want the delta between report and customer outage detected to be as small as possible. The way it usually works is that we have the platform alarms and pages go first, and then the platform engineer usually will page a support eng. to run communications.

Usually the priority is to have the platform engineer focus on triaging the issue and then offload the workload to our support team so that we can accurately state what is going on. We have a new comms clustering system that rolling out so that if we get 5 reports with the similar content, it pages up to the support team as well. (We will roll this out after we communicated with affected customers first.)

iJohnDoe4• 5 months ago

Thanks for the reply. Understood.

In situations like this, please dedicate at least one team member to respond as quickly as possible to the Railway Help Station posts. That's where your customers are going for communication and support.

HaZeust• 5 months ago

Wasn't half the HN crowd repping this place yesterday when the Vercel CEO offered to pay for Jmail? Rough lol

arsalanb2• 5 months ago

We weren’t affected, but as a startup I’ll take a minor outage over getting stonewalled by GCP/Azure/AWS any day. Railway has consistently been responsive and actually understands the problem you’re describing. With the big three, unless you’re spending serious money or paying for premium support, you often just get links to docs instead of real help.

everfrustrated• 5 months ago

If you don't pay for support, why complain if you don't get it?

arsalanb2• 5 months ago

I will charge you $100 to answer that question

azebasse• 5 months ago

weak post mortem: https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-february-11-2026

Repeating “~3% impacted” three times? Damage control. Got wrecked. DB SIGTERM’d, app dead for hours, before they even posted a status update. 3% is 100% outage when it’s your stuff: broken dashboards and zero warning.

Railway (PaaS) global outage

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