Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]

https://status.railway.com/incident/I23M92U0

by aarondf • 2 months ago

560 357 2 months ago

status.railway.com

Subsequent thread: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770

iloveplants2• 2 months ago

seems like it's every day

throwaranay4933• 2 months ago

This screenshot from Discord suggests the idea that the outage is caused by automated GCP account ban: https://x.com/acgfbr/status/2056866780866351323

Alive-in-20252• 2 months ago

Automated account bans are the bane of internet existence today. I was banned from reddit for "bad behavior", I appealed and both times it's oops, there was nothing there, some automated system thought your comment was rude even though it wasn't.

Then they send you very strongly worded messages that says trying to work around the ban will lead to something bad happening.

I've been worried my main email account provider would do this. The core issue is even if you pay, even if you are a company as shown here companies don't carefully enough have limits on banning. I can only imagine they ban lots of scammy things every day so "they think it's working great".

faangguyindia2• 2 months ago

Google cloud also locked out a Korean Goverment Organization recently. The guy posted on GCP subreddit.

Google really need to improve their support team. It's strange such a big corp can't even afford to have proper support team.

King-Aaron• 2 months ago

It's strange such a big corp can't even afford to have proper support team

This seems to be by design.

ndneighbor6• 2 months ago

We have a CSM, Head of Customer Support contact, and further contacts with GCP. Despite that, we still had this issue.

danpalmer3• 2 months ago

It's strange such a big corp can't even afford to have proper support team

Railway say they are in touch with that support team.

shooker435• 2 months ago

god help them

add-sub-mul-div• 2 months ago

Automating support, automating everything is the key to their whole deal. Tech giants leapfrogged the rest of the economy by innovating a company that can scale its customers without having to scale itself proportionally.

benwoodward• 2 months ago

pretty sure their support team is a flaky ML model that is haplessly flagging random accounts

choilive3• 2 months ago

Not strange, Google has never had a proper support team unless you are an "Enterprise" level customer.

aranelsurion• 2 months ago

support team

They must’ve upgraded them to Gemini 3.5 by now.

mcontrerazCL• 2 months ago

all my fkn postgres bd in railways! what do i do now?

cactusplant73742• 2 months ago

Take a walk. Breathe in the fresh air. It feels good.

eoswald5• 2 months ago

Hahah at least you're not getting called every five minutes because you cant shut off the alerts, because its apparently deployed SOMEWHERE but good luck finding how to access it. Can't wait to see the bill from Twilio because of this lol

gnabgib• 2 months ago

Dupe - join the discussion started an hour ago instead of query string work (12 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827

aarondf• 2 months ago

I added the qs because it defaulted to a story from 3 months ago.

ryanisnan3• 2 months ago

Yikes. I was wondering why my TLS certs were coming up as invalid.

eoswald5• 2 months ago

Sorry, I have a hard time blaming Google for this, when Railway seems to be having increasing trouble keeping the platform stable. Something like this should NOT take down an ENTIRE service. There should be a backup when literally your business is about being the reliable backend. This just seems like poor planning to me.

cactusplant73742• 2 months ago

Disaster recovery is pretty expensive, right? Especially for their size.

ryanisnan3• 2 months ago

I don't quite know what you mean. Do you really expect Railway to use a multi-cloud architecture to host all of their client's projects? I suspect that would lead to a lower availability, all things considered.

impulser_2• 2 months ago

They literally own their own data centers. That's whats surprising about this. They are lying to their customers when they say they operate their own data center because obviously they don't if everyone's apps are down with GCP blocking their account.

eoswald5• 2 months ago

Well, in the same token, is it smart to base your ENTIRE architecture on a single cloud architecture? Isn't that why some of us build in fallbacks for AWS-hosted services? I mean, their enitre platform, both public and private facing, is running on the same thing. One error, one problem, takes out the entire service.

brokenodo2• 2 months ago

I’m a new customer and have been falling in love with Railway over the last 2 weeks, but this is quite the wake up call.

csw-0012• 2 months ago

Literally in the same boat. I've been really happy with it, but this is a major eye opener.... It's been done for a looooong time by provider standards.

reelvideocap• 2 months ago

same

TheAtomic• 2 months ago

same same

choilive3• 2 months ago

Been a customer with them for over a year now, small incidents here and there but never anything this major.

Mengkudulangsat• 2 months ago

That explains why all my vibe-coded hobby projects are down.

Thank God I'm not dealing with any public-facing sites! Would have been an expensive lesson for a newbie coder if my job depended on this.

rekabis4• 2 months ago

TL;DR: putting all your eggs into one basket is bad, man.

canpan• 2 months ago

How to handle domains? The rest is easy, but your domain registrar blocking you sounds like a pain. My current solution is to use a local small provider, just for the domain. Then if there is a problem with your play account it is out of any blast radius.

FlamingMoe• 2 months ago

What do you mean by local small provider? A registrar on main street?

truekonrads• 2 months ago

MarkMonitor

rekabis4• 2 months ago

What the deuce are you blathering on about. An account got blocked, this has nothing to do with a domain.

And I’m talking about having disparate failovers that don’t rely on a single hosting provider. At that point, who cares what Google does to your cloud account… work with the hot failover and spin up another hot failover somewhere else.

binarycleric2• 2 months ago

Same applies to all the companies betting the farm on AWS.

rekabis4• 2 months ago

Precisely. If you’re going to have a hot failover, it behoves you to have an entirely separate entity billing you for that hosting.

Honestly, I don’t know where the downvotes are coming from. Do people have no clue about service resiliency? I can understand if it’s a personal project or you haven’t yet scaled to paying customers, but anything at scale with serious money involved needs to be completely independent of the underlying hosting. It should remain up even if an entire provider goes titsup.

Aachen• 2 months ago

Note, you submitted a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201711 (the comment I'm replying to is 1 ID older so I guess this is the canonical one to reply to)

rekabis4• 2 months ago

TL;DR: putting all your eggs into one basket is bad, man.

lfx• 2 months ago

That’s true, however having only few eggs and shopping for several baskets does not make sense in early days. Not sure how big railway is, but usually you start small with one egg.

christophilus• 2 months ago

You’d think they wouldn’t have started with GCP. There are plenty of datacenters where you can buy racks and racks of servers, and talk to a human when something goes wrong, and even walk in and access your servers. That’s what I’d be using if I were to build a Rackspace today.

bshack0• 2 months ago

so....what are we switching to y'all? cloud-run ? ;P

auxiliarymoose• 2 months ago

federated hardware (a bunch of raspberry pis networked into a high availability kubernetes cluster, hidden across various local coffee shops for free power and bandwidth)

throwatdem12311• 2 months ago

raspberry-pi cluster in my closet

frio• 2 months ago

16GiB Raspberry Pi 5s in my country are now going for ~$450USD, so I've gotta say that's out of reach for me now :(.

enahs-sf2• 2 months ago

I respect what railway is doing but also would never run my business on such a platform.

dpark• 2 months ago

That kind of sounds like you don’t respect what they are doing.

enahs-sf2• 2 months ago

I think it’s good people are making IaaS platforms, but have dealt with enough firefighter hero bullshit to have seen this coming a mile away. Uptime and redundancy are strongly correlated.

eoswald5• 2 months ago

Today changed my opinion on them completely. Was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're growing fast, but now seeing that they've failed to scale properly, and are missing little things that become big things later. I can't take that risk.

fjni• 2 months ago

Wait… railway runs on GCP? Didn’t they make a whole thing about not “building a cloud on top of another cloud?”

Or did they just mean that they’re not renting VPSs but only metal from the cloud provider?

In my mind I was so excited that there was another provider not just paying one of the hyperscalars but at a minimum colocating and owning more of their stack. https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run

eoswald5• 2 months ago

Yep, and this is why I'm pissed. They lied. They're completely dependent on GCP. So, I gotta do some research, i need something a little more stable (and less dependent on one company's whims) than this. This is bad for them, because it really strikes at the heart of their 'big claim,' peacefull software deployments. This is chaos.

ndneighbor6• 2 months ago

Yea, I mean, that's the whole MO of our platform and we failed at that. So yea, that's disappointing and more so for our customers.

I can provide an explanation about the GCP dependency. Yes, we have host workloads off GCP, and we have been able to build a good business by performing a cloud exit. However, we were worried that we would have a circular dependency on our own cloud. I don't think we expected to get auto-modded out of our own account, hence we left our DB on CloudSQL.

It was never our intent to deceive people that we didn't own our own destiny with our business. The last GCP issue, we were assured that this scenario wouldn't happen (when we got auto-ratelimited, which was bad, but survivable) - but it seems like we have further work to do. Apologies.

miniman1337• 2 months ago

from the blog linked via Wayback Machine. "From Day 1, we had this notion at the forefront.

The other notion that we have intuited is that you can’t build a cloud on another cloud. We have devoted years of practice running our own metal (and playing well with other clouds) to make sure that Railway’s business, which invariably becomes your customer’s business, is as rock solid as possible."

MrDarcy2• 2 months ago

That’s strange, when I interviewed with the founder a few years ago he told me they were on AWS wanting to move to firecracker.

dlcarrier2• 2 months ago

I'm not familiar with Railway, so this might not make any sense, but it's possible they were using their own hardware but managing it with Google accounts. It's not uncommon for a company's offsite human-to-human communications to fail when there's a Google outage or ban, so it's not unexpected to have the same interference with human-to-machine or machine-to-machine communications.

Avicebron2• 2 months ago

Isn't Railway the "the API key to delete the backups is in the prod database, because that's where the backups live duh" guys?

trvz• 2 months ago

No, this is the company that failed those guys.

You should also read the story, as you're perpetuating a false version of it: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

dangoodmanUT• 2 months ago

It has been 0 days since GCP has taken down a startup (again).

You see this at least once a year. Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.

In all seriousness, this is why we don't use them. They have the most ergonomic cloud of the big three, then absolutely murder it by having this kind of reputation.

tjpnz• 2 months ago

AWS normally contacts you first.

cherioo• 2 months ago

They better do. What is google doing?

kevin_nisbet3• 2 months ago

Do they?

The only anecdotal thing I've seen is we hired a vendor to do a pentest a few years ago, and they setup some stuff in an AWS account and that account got totally yeeted out of existence by AWS if memory serves.

abrookewood• 2 months ago

Yep, agree 100%. Such a stupid move on their behalf.

jameson2• 2 months ago

What was the reason GCP took down a startup previously?

__s• 2 months ago

hn.algolia.com gcp blocked

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33360416

Then I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577

somewhatgoated3• 2 months ago

On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP, unlike AWS/Azure who seem to go down catastrophically a couple of times per year.

corpoposter• 2 months ago

IIRC the Paris datacenter flood took down a whole “region” and some data was permanently unrecoverable.

JoRyGu• 2 months ago

AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time (as long as they aren't down because Iran blew up their data center). That's obviously REALLY bad for certain industries, but I suspect for the vast majority of their customers it's not a big deal. We've been able to isolate the damage almost every time just by having AZ failover in place and avoiding us-east-1 where we can.

pixl97• 2 months ago

GCP never goes down because they banned all their customers.

plandis• 2 months ago

GCP has had outages. From a quick search it looks like they had a global outage less than a year ago:

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

devmor• 2 months ago

There was a pretty bad one last summer - their IAM system got a bad update and it broke almost all GCP services for an hour or so, since every authenticated API call reaches out to IAM.

It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.

abofh• 2 months ago

I've been in AWS for almost twenty years at this point. It's been a long time since I've seen a global outage of the data plane on anything. The control plane, especially the US-east-1 services? Yes - but if you're off of east-1, your outages are measured in missile strikes, not botched deployments.

blobbers• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, if everyone goes down people are understanding. If just _you_ go down, then its oddly less forgiveable.

danesparza• 2 months ago

You can read the parent post, right?

Izikiel432• 2 months ago

I still remember the one where they nuked all the storage of I think an Australian insurance company I think, luckily the it department had done a multi cloud setup for backups

adamtaylor_13• 2 months ago

Perhaps you don't notice GCP outages because so few companies rely on them?

manyatoms• 2 months ago

How is blackhole-ing a customer not considered an outage?

nemothekid• 2 months ago

On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP

They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.

onion2k2• 2 months ago

You can't have 100% uptime. It's unfeasible, especially for a startup. You should be telling your customers that downtime might happen, sometimes for reasons beyond your control, and that if it does then you'll do your best to recover and to compensate them for the inconvenience. You should cultivate a relationship with your early customers that makes them feel bad for you when there's an outage rather than angry about how it impacts them. Maybe even go as far as firing the customers who give you a hard time over it. That way if your cloud provider falls over it's really annoying but not a big deal.

Your cloud provider blocking your business from running is far worse.

mlhpdx• 2 months ago

None of the AWS “outages” have impacted us. They have either been regional, in which case we stand down the region (we run multiple hot regions), or didn’t involve things we need to maintain operation.

I can’t imagine AWS ever doing such a cascading delete. I mean, they have made deletion protection a difficult thing to ignore even for individual resources.

rozap• 2 months ago

Yep, we also don't touch them for this same reason.

overfeed• 2 months ago

Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.

AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.

stingraycharles• 2 months ago

That’s an entirely different type of problem, and avoidable by just using us-east-2 (I still don’t understand why people default to us-east-1 unless they require some highly specific services).

mgfist• 2 months ago

And we all celebrate it since we can't do any work

yandie• 2 months ago

During my 5 years of my startup, we had only 1 outage due to AWS because we picked us-west-2 as the primary reason. If anyone starting a company and picks us-east-1 as the primary reason, they should be fired. There's absolutely no reason to be in that region.

xavdid• 2 months ago

If my cloud provider brings my startup down, it's my problem. If they bring all the startups down, that's their problem.

busterarm• 2 months ago

Hetzner and OVH also do this all the time.

It's AWS and Azure that are the outliers and tend not to care too much what their customers do with their infrastructure. AWS is perfectly fine with allowing me to run copies of 15 year old vulnerable AMIs copied from AMIs they've long since deprecated and removed. Even for removed features like NAT AMIs.

Spooky23• 2 months ago

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

Azure nerfed the front door of all Azure and O365 services last year.

All of these companies are great at what they did, and occasionally fuck up.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 2 months ago

AWS has throttled our service so badly that we couldn't operate. I was thinking of writing a blog post about how they stalled our growth for a month but it seems moot

TheTaytay2• 2 months ago

I’ve seen a few smug “all your eggs in one basket” comments here.

I’m aware of some companies hosting their own metal and infra, but I’m not aware of large companies mitigating risk by hosting on separate cloud providers as a fallback mechanism. We might disagree with cloud provider choice, or think they should have been hosting their own metal, but that’s still an “all your eggs in one basket” choice, right?

Heck, they might even have multi-region fallback with GCP, but if GCP bans your account, that doesn’t matter.

Are there good examples of running a company of railway’s size so redundantly that their host could nuke one of their accounts and they’d just keep on trucking?

fontain2• 2 months ago

They do run their own metal. That’s their entire ethos. Railway is their own cloud.

chradams• 2 months ago

Just google multi-cloud. Yes. It's a thing.

wmf3• 2 months ago

99% of multi-cloud is fake though. True multi-cloud is incredibly rare.

rvz• 2 months ago

Let me guess… Googler running AI agent in production that blocked this startup’s account.

dwa3592• 2 months ago

Wait, I thought railway was a cloud provider like AWS, GCP but better and more agile. At least that's the impression i got from their website.

whh3• 2 months ago

This could kill a startup. I really don't like Google's automated and silent account murder functionality.

MrDarcy2• 2 months ago

There’s no way this was automated or silent.

The only reasonable explanation is Railway lost control of their estate and something was happening that warranted a group of humans to decide flipping the kill switch was the best of a set of bad alternatives.

macintux• 2 months ago

You’re giving Google far more credit than they’ve earned.

faangguyindia2• 2 months ago

you can go on google cloud subreddit and watch horror stories

i actually built a good plan out of those horror stories for my companies.

codegeek• 2 months ago

This is bad. Even their own website is down at railway.com. Looks like total dependency on google cloud. Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.

choilive3• 2 months ago

They run a decent amount of their own compute/bare metal server for customer workloads. But likely still had some critical dependencies on GCP.

cube002• 2 months ago

Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.

Not sure too many VCs would be cool with deep redundancy when there's more features to build to bring in more customers instead.

rmeara• 2 months ago

Google has a total dependency on it's own infra and does fine. Why do its customers need multicloud? Huge PITA unless you need an absurd number of 9s

Drew-Aetherwave• 2 months ago

It is killing me...

isninkhamiss• 2 months ago

github got way more noise for less

Osborn_Ojure• 2 months ago

compute recovered, get ready boys!

r_lee2• 2 months ago

seriously, is it possible to trust GCP with critical data/services at this point if you're not a billion dollar company?

I'm exaggerating but someone said they got "auto banned"

what if that happens to a small account which hosts some really important data/services there?

Avicebron2• 2 months ago

what if that happens to a small account which hosts some really important data/services there?

Pray to @dang that you will make the front page of HN?

throwaway85825• 2 months ago

Even if you are a billion dollar company you still have problems like the Australian pension did. Google is just that bad.

ttoinou• 2 months ago

Railway isnt far from being a billion dollar company, no ?

intelVISA• 2 months ago

I don't want to believe this, lol.

xyzzy_plugh• 2 months ago

I've managed several accounts with GCP over the years and I've always maintained a great relationship with our contacts there. Some of these accounts were quite small, on the order of <$20k/mo, and even then we were kept abreast of anything that might be cause for concern. I always maintain a standing biweekly meeting with at least someone on the other side (account exec, technical staff, whatever) and I've yet to be blindsided by anything.

Is Google's communication good? No, not particularly. The only way something like TFA happens is if the relationship is neglected (by one or both parties). I'm not saying Railway did something wrong, but there are usually many flags and opportunities to correct long before drastic actions.

I get the impression that Railway plays fast and loose with a lot of their limits and resources and that Google may not be a fan of that.

Edit: would also like to say that if you put all your resources in one GCP project you are going to have a bad time. If you organize stuff over many projects it is very unlikely that they will ever take account wide action. I've had issues with, for example, a particular tenant's behavior, but it never jeopardized the other tenants.

chi_features2• 2 months ago

https://blog.railway.com/p/series-b

Agreed. Railway are probably not far off a billion dollar company though!

jrockway• 2 months ago

I don't think you can ever trust one service with critical data. Some Claude instance deletes your prod database, you have to restore from an offsite backup because it also deleted your local backups. Even at small startups we did pg_dump to AWS from GCP because ... who knows what is going to happen to GCP, and we want to continue to be in business if that happens.

I don't feel safe with any one single point of failure. "Your credit card bounced", "you thought it was dev", "you got hacked", etc. are all the same problem to me and no cloud provider solves those merely by setting up an account.

tux• 2 months ago

At this point you can’t trust Google anymore, it keeps breaking things. Imagine having Google AI do this thins automatically. Will have apocalypse in in a day.

jefborges• 2 months ago

Railway is back, but I’m not sure if I can trust keeping my projects there, so I’m going to migrate to another company.

oofbey2• 2 months ago

After reading about how their delete database API also deletes all the backups, I concluded they are not to be trusted.

CodesInChaos• 2 months ago

Don't all major clouds do that by default? But at least they have additional protections you can configure, if you know about them.

marknutter• 2 months ago

It's not back.

orliesaurus• 2 months ago

I wonder if someone has exploited a weird Google-safety automated process to report something on Railway which caused Google to block the whole thing.

padolsey• 2 months ago

Does anyone know how this even happens inside the walls of google? Is it an automated process? How is such a (presumably) high revenue account just magically blocked without human intervention? I'm quite perplexed.

jpollock2• 2 months ago

There would have been efforts to contact them, but it would have been via their contact method, aka the email they set it up with.

Common ways this happens? They are using a credit card to run their business with no backup payment method. Then the company's contact person is on vacation.

scratchyone• 2 months ago

Honestly still insane to nuke a high-volume client's business after a single payment issue. There would be no reason for Google to believe that a single hiccup like that is evidence that they won't get paid and have to cut account access immediately.

mbreese• 2 months ago

Yeah, I'm not sure what to think here. We know Google is not the best at customer service and has automated account suspensions. But, what I'm curious about here is why this happened.

Railway hosts applications for customers. An uneducated guess for some possible reasons: 1) one of those customers hosted something they shouldn't have 2) railway had something spawn that took up too many resources 3) Or their account balance was too high 4) Or something...

But all of this probably culminates in someone needed to read an email that was missed.

Scaling a customer infrastructure setup like Railway is hard. This is one of the non-technical hard parts - how to make sure your account with your primary vendor is safe. But, I'm willing to wait to pass judgement here until more information is available. I'm sure the post-mortem will have lessons. I'd like to know more.

thayne• 2 months ago

via their contact method, aka the email they set it up with

If it's anything like AWS, that may be just one of hundreds of emails they send every day, most of which are just noise.

jasonkester• 2 months ago

Yeah, compared to the AWS experience:

I had a toy Free Tier account that managed to overstep a limit one month and rack up $0.0038 in charges.

AWS hounded me about it for an entire year before finally putting the account on hold. Then kept at it for months more before finally deleting it.

It’s pike the paperboy from Better off Dead, if he were to continue delivering newspapers while hounding you for his two dollars.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827

binarycleric2• 2 months ago

How the heck do these things happen, especially with companies with huge monthly spend? At my last job we had some suspicious workloads running on AWS and our TAM reached out to us before taking any action. Who wants to bet this was some AI automation gone wrong and because GCP seems to be allergic to actually contacting a human to get a response, this just sits in some support queue that outsourced workers look at after a few hours just to give a canned response?

garciasn3• 2 months ago

Nothing surprises me with anything related to support on GCP. While we absolutely do not need them, I have been through no less than 12 different Account Executives over the last 6y and they're all ENTIRELY and COMPLETELY useless.

They all introduce themselves, beg me to setup a meeting w/them and some sort of engineering resource(s), and they come to a meeting with a canned slide deck that is so absurdly unrelated to us that I just laugh, and then the next time I hear from them it's because we have a new AE.

This is my most recent reply (right after Next '26):

I really appreciate you reaching out; however, we have met with, I dunno at this point, more than a dozen GCP Account reps, execs, technical teams, etc over the years and there's little to no value for us or you, now or in the future. Please do feel free to invest your time on your other clients. We're good; truly.

I love GCP and its services; we have been very pleased with it over the years, but the human side of it? Fucking sucks and I just don't see why they even bother.

OptionOfT• 2 months ago

It's because they're measured on something, unsure which metric, but it's definitely not how helpful they are to you.

idontwantthis• 2 months ago

It doesn’t worry you enough that someday you could have a serious problem and they wouldn’t be able to help you?

dylanpyle• 2 months ago

For what it's worth - I'm not sure what the criteria is (I assume we're "medium sized / not a big upsell opportunity"?) - our GCP rep quickly pushed us to switching to using a GCP reseller. They took over our billing so that we can pay via ACH, and provide both free first-line support/escalation and paid engagements for bigger projects; they don't charge a premium on top, apparently Google pays them for supporting us. Hasn't made much of a difference in how we operate, but at least we have a direct-ish line for issues when they come up.

shye3• 2 months ago

That's exactly why I'm less pleased with GCP: to trust a CSP (or any service), I need to be assured that when (not if) things go wrong, I could escalate to a team that would have my back.

throwaway041207• 2 months ago

This is actually kind of validating. I work for a company that spends almost 1mm a year on GCP. We've never had an actual support contract with them because the numbers work out to, at a minimum, being 10% of our spend. We've yet to encounter a situation where we actually needed GCP support, so we've held off. In the moments where we'd like to get some support (mostly around datastore behavior) we've managed to work around it or figure it out ourselves. So it's good to know we haven't missed out on much. Beyond the offensive aspect of GCP offering no support if we aren't willing to cough up a non-trivial percentage of our spend, I'm pretty happy with it.

guluarte• 2 months ago

It's Google. They let you use their services, but the moment you don't fit the norm, they suspend you.

rajeshvar• 2 months ago

What does blocked mean? Is there a different post that I am missing? There is shared infrastructure in GCP for networking (ex-googler here) and if only railway is affected, then it is not clear if it is only GCP or if there is something from Railway's perspective that needs to be addressed.

ndneighbor6• 2 months ago

huh- I guess there are two HN submissions with meaningful replies...

I said this in the other thread, we got access to our account back, but even with a Account Rep. and a CSM on our account- it still took them a while to figure out what was going on.

I'm sure it could have been worse if we didn't have a rep on our account.

bearjaws• 2 months ago

I will never leverage GCP in an enterprise setting, it's honestly amazing how hard they fumble the bag. Will be interesting to see when GCP support started working with them, from the updates there was an hour and change from when they identified the issue and GCP support was confirmed.

In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.

UrbanNorminal• 2 months ago

Is google allergic to humans or something? Cannot they just send an email or call the company before taking a wrecking ball to the entire company's infra? Are they stupid?

BarryMilo• 2 months ago

Surely this is automated. They wouldn't waste precious dollars on employing humans just to keep other humans happy.

snypher• 2 months ago

It surprises me there's not a manual review for $$$$ accounts. Speculation at this stage, but it's weird they would be put in the Recycle Bin like that.

lateral_cloud• 2 months ago

Keep the pitchforks at bay for now. No one knows what actually happened yet and we are only seeing one side of this outage.

BitWiseVibe• 2 months ago

As someone who runs some public APIs, the amount of spam from Railway IPs is insane. They have horrible abuse prevention. Hopefully this encourages them to improve their operations.

nikcub2• 2 months ago

This is the conflict at the center of running a hosting company - make it easy to signup and you get a lot of new users but also a lot of abuse.

Implement anti-abuse measures and you will hit some loud false positives (this may be the case with GCP here).

I don't envy anybody running a hosting co - the internet is a really ugly place under the surface.

edit: to add - AWS are really good here. Must be the ~30 years of retail fraud and abuse experience.

edelbitter• 2 months ago

I continue to receive phishing via AWS pretending to be Amazon. And not even the Unicode-lookalike shenanigans that my spam filter refuses for excessive mixed scripts, no; literally claiming to be Amazon as in: the company that operates the relay.

swyx3• 2 months ago

i wonder if DID or World (various ways of Proof of Human) can help solve this issue.

bootsmann• 2 months ago

Is it really a false positive if railway lets people run abusive services on GCP and then GCP consequently shuts them down?

duckmysick• 2 months ago

Hetzner is famously aggressive with their KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements, often locking new sign-ups and asking for photos of ID.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

redanddead• 2 months ago

one of the many reasons companies are cloud agnostic and dont want to get locked in

fh67• 2 months ago

Yeah but until you find that the new cloud provider won't approve your compute quota or doesn't have enough capacity in the region or you hit fraud flags for stagnant account spinning up lots of compute.

parineum• 2 months ago

There's a lot of, what seems to me, unfounded blame being directed at Google for this. Isn't railway the company that just blamed Anthropic for deleting their prod database?

mmmore• 2 months ago

Nope, Railway was the company who was hosting PocketOS, which is the company that blamed Cursor for deleting their prod database. Railway is only involved insofar as their API allowed an instant delete of the prod database.

oofbey2• 2 months ago

Railway deserves a lot of blame here. Deleting backups along with the database is a lot like not having backups. Moronic design choice.

sidrag22• 2 months ago

fairly certain you are remembering the goofy article that was going around where a railway user allowed an agent to delete his db. iirc he questioned the agent after and the agent told him it should have read the file that told him not to do things, so just sounds like he deleted his db and blamed his tools.

brokenodo2• 2 months ago

Well, as a 2 week tenured and very happy Railway customer until now, I am now a Render customer. Somehow DNS cut over within 1 min(!) and live after about 30 minutes of work. Not bad!

DrewADesign2• 2 months ago

In my experience, DNS changes are a lot faster than they used to be. There’s some website that has a map that tries to resolve your domain with a bunch of name servers around the world that was pretty neat to look at last time I migrated something.

nbarbettini• 2 months ago

I became so conditioned to waiting hours(!) for DNS propagation that I'm always pleasantly surprised when it takes <5 min these days.

twostorytower• 2 months ago

I love pointing my name servers to Cloudflare so any DNS changes from that are practically instant.

swyx3• 2 months ago

as with many things, we say we like decentralization but quietly vote for centralization

usernametaken29• 2 months ago

I didn’t knew Railway so with this misleading headline I thought a Google Cloud data centre was being built in the way of a railroad. That’d been a funny story to read..

astafrig• 2 months ago

How is the title misleading?

tauntz• 2 months ago

"Railway Blocked by Google Cloud"

If you don't happen to know that "Railway" is referring to a company, then you might reasonably read that as "a GCP outage caused issues in the train network somewhere".

Polizeiposaune• 2 months ago

An elevated railroad once ran through one end of what is now a Google-owned building (Chelsea Market in Manhattan). It's now part of the High Line elevated pedestrian park.

hnburnsy2• 2 months ago

From their founder on X...

"Absolutely. The Railway network is a mesh ring between AWS, GCP, and Metal

So: - High availability interconnects - High availability path routing between clouds - Database itself is high availability

However, Google's VPC itself is not. So we will add a shard to Metal and AWS"

hnburnsy2• 2 months ago

More here...

https://x.com/JustJake

sammy22552• 2 months ago

The 3-2-1 backup rule is pretty outdated in the world of cloud. You could have 3 complete copies of your data in different S3 buckets, but if they're all under the same account you've lost your blast radius protection

rsync• 2 months ago

If only there were a quick and easy way to replicate s3 buckets to an independent provider…

… on the Unix command line …

… to a cloud older than AWS…

… if only …

eclipticplane• 2 months ago

I don't think that technology exists. Sorry.

oefrha• 2 months ago

Well having backups help, but I certainly can’t migrate my infra to rsync.net on moments’ notice (or ever since rsync.net does storage and nothing else) so my customers aren’t affected.

funtech• 2 months ago

Wish I could upvote this comment account more. Too many people look for something new and shiny when trusty ol tools are sitting right there. :)

lemagedurage• 2 months ago

Inflated egress costs might make this prohibitively expensive, $80 per TB at GCP and AWS

whalesalad• 2 months ago

You replicate data to different clouds.

zootboy• 2 months ago

It's not outdated, you just actually need to follow it. 3 copies of data in separate S3 buckets is ignoring the "2" in the 3-2-1 rule: 2 different mediums, and also the "1" rule: 1 copy offsite. In the cloud era, offsite means not on the same cloud provider. Different mediums ideally means a non-cloud provider (e.g. a NAS at your office under your control).

sammy22552• 2 months ago

It certainly is outdated, by that very example you just provied. Why can't my two backups be on two separate S3 providers?

chatmasta• 2 months ago

I thought Railway was building their own data centers? [0]

The fact of the matter is, you simply cannot build a cloud on someone else’s cloud.

Indeed…

[0] https://blog.railway.com/p/launch-week-02-welcome

QuinnyPig• 2 months ago

Vercel seems to be pulling it off. So does PlanetScale, albeit for databases only. But everything’s a database.

jujube3• 2 months ago

If you buy a cloud-on-a-cloud, you're a clown-on-a-clown.

zelon88• 2 months ago

Wild to me that any tech sector business would want to rent an operating environment to park their entire infrastructure into. This is the equivalent to traveling shoe salesmen setting up a tent in the parking lot of a strip mall.

fnord77• 2 months ago

wish I knew what "railway" is

leventhan• 2 months ago

What's a good alternative to Railway?

valgaze• 2 months ago

May 2024 UniSuper incident: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...

A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

8 May 2024

UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.

While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.

Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events, where an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.

This is described as an isolated, “one-of-a-kind occurrence” that has never before occurred with any Google Cloud client globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the sequence of events and taken measures to ensure it does not happen again.

Why did the outage last so long?

UniSuper had duplication across two geographies as protection against outages and data loss. However, the deletion of the Private Cloud subscription triggered deletion across both geographies.

Restoring the Private Cloud required significant coordination and effort between UniSuper and Google Cloud, including recovery of hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications.

kvakvs• 2 months ago

The instant cascading worldwide deletion upon closing or deleting a subscription sounds like a recipe for disaster. Why not mark it for deletion and delete say... a day or a week later?

modernpacifist• 2 months ago

Either mark-for-delete has the same impact as deleting in terms of shooting all the Cloud resources associated with the subscription, at which point the outage still happens but maybe the recovery is smoother or you've just delayed the inevitable by a week because no one will look at it unless there is actual impact.

shye3• 2 months ago

From personal experience, as a customer who once did something stupid: Google Cloud does soft deletes. But you need to reach out to support fast enough. And really, if you deleted something important and discovered it only the next day, and not within minutes, you're having a bigger issue that a soft delete won't solve.

manapause• 2 months ago

It’s a good question. That said unless there are compliance or fallback concerns i would prefer a service that burns my data on departure.

locknitpicker8• 2 months ago

The instant cascading worldwide deletion upon closing or deleting a subscription sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I don't agree. What do you expect to happen when you explicitly delete your user account? Do you expect your systems to remain in operation for a week? That itself would be a major risk and liability, as your whole infrastructure would still be up even though you cut your access to it.

Also, isn't your whole infrastructure expected to be automatically deployed with IaC? The notable exception is data, which is already soft deleted and recoverable through customer support.

All in all, where do you expect the customer's responsibility to end and the cloud provider's to start? The shared responsibility model is covered by any intro course in no uncertain terms.

dantiberian• 2 months ago

I wrote about the UniSuper issue at the time: https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper. It was a pretty nasty bug where their VMWare environment was created with a one-year expiry date, but was one "resource" from the perspective of Google Cloud.

suttontom• 2 months ago

"UniSuper’s production Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) private cloud was automatically deleted one year after it’s creation due to a misconfiguration in how it was created. When it was created, there was a bug in the creation script which passed a null value."

That's pretty amazing. Not due to a cascading failure from someone changing a config deep inside of a system that caused a bunch of unintended effects, just someone who messed up writing a shell script?

raverbashing4• 2 months ago

Creating stuff with 1yr (implicit) expiry by default is just a delayed footgun tbh

karlkloss• 2 months ago

"deletion of the Private Cloud subscription triggered deletion across both geographies"

It's called single point of failure, and it's the nightmare of everyone who was ever in charge of safety.

bilalq• 2 months ago

Building a startup on GCP (or even Google Workspace) is an existential risk.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

Do not become dependent on Google. Ever.

koolhead17• 2 months ago

Let's blame some rouge AI agent at GCP causing this.

eezing• 2 months ago

“Deletion of private cloud subscription…”

Who deleted it?

mjy78• 2 months ago

All in on cloud so we don’t need to worry about backups. Now your subscription is the single point of failure.

dlcarrier2• 2 months ago

This is the kind of outage worthy of a Kevin Fang video.

thrownthatway• 2 months ago

Huh.

Railway dot com

Has nothing to do with railways.

I wish software people would get their own words.

patrickmay• 2 months ago

I was also expecting a story about a physical railway being shut down.

jaspanglia• 2 months ago

Cloud platform dependencies are becoming a huge single point of failure

steve19772• 2 months ago

Lesson learned: don't rely on a single hyperscaler, even (or especially) as a startup.

burnerRhodov3• 2 months ago

I just... I don't really understand why startups even use AWS, GC, or any other cloud hosted software? Hetzner, etc. Are all extremely cheap, and honestly scale so well... Code nowadays is cheaper for configs, and having full control over your compute is... liberating.

steve19772• 2 months ago

Oh absolutely... and many use architectures that have evolved out of the needs of really big companies and are not really a good fit for a startup. But I guess they want to be "ready for growth".

dannersy• 2 months ago

Low cost to entry, easy to get scale from the beginning if you need it. The large cloud providers throw free credit at startups to lock them in all the time. I had a short lived stint trying to get my own startup off the ground and it was really easy to get free compute from Google with no strings attached. This was many years ago now, but I would be surprised if it is any different.

I am with you entirely and would not have taken that route today, but it is really easy to see why people go that route.

antran222• 2 months ago

A few years ago, when I was kinda active in the startup scene in my area, you have people selling access to cloud credits with penny-on-the-dollar price. The credits are given out liberally to big-corps, organization by AWS/GCP, through workshops, webinars, events. All in the hope of roping the departments into building MVPs, demos on AWS/GCP, but people also find a way to cheat on that system and make some quick bucks.

I know a startup of my acquaintances that have been running on AWS for 5 years straight without paying a single dollar to AWS. When the credits almost run out, they started to migrate their data over to another account with credit. That happened twice already.

It helps to have a portable, replicable IaC config. But also this is sustainable because they are a pretty small struggling shop. You will probably not be able to do this if you are trying to maintain more than 3 nines for an enterprise client.

chi_features2• 2 months ago

Perhaps Railway does a bit more than what you think, they have some great functionality (I'm not affiliated with them). Check out [Features | Railway](https://railway.com/features) "PR Environments", they are incredible for the QA process

pavelevst• 2 months ago

Avoid vendor locking, have backups, make disaster recovery standby (or plan for quick recovery elsewhere)

tardwrangler• 2 months ago

Everyone is eager to point a finger at Google, but I've been a user of Railway for a while now, and I've seen enough nonsense to want to hear what GCP has to say about this before drawing any conclusions. Let's just say Railway has had problems like this before, and the way their team handles them does not inspire any confidence.

Regardless of how it happened, for me, this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

prathamtharwani• 2 months ago

Could you point us to any specific past instances? I'd be interested to read about them.

jeffreyq• 2 months ago

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

locknitpicker8• 2 months ago

Let's just say Railway has had problems like this before, and the way their team handles them does not inspire any confidence.

This. It's very odd that in other threads we see a bunch of accounts heavily invested in criticizing a cloud provider, but what's conspicuously absent from this wave of indignation is any curiosity in the root cause, or even any interest in exploring what it might have been. Quite odd.

gizzlon• 2 months ago

Agreed, I'm very curious as to how this could happen.

But TheRegister did reach out to Google and they have not replied yet: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/05/20/google-cloud...

puppymaster• 2 months ago

another ditto from me, albeit anecdotal again. Railway dev teams play fast and loose with sprinkles of vibe coding everywhere on top. There's 'oops yea bear with us we are still a startup' and then there's railway.

swyx3• 2 months ago

i mean even google and aws are not without sin on this one. maybe wait for an RCA before punching someone who is currently down. theres a reason classy people do "hugops" when a competitor goes down, regardless of reputation.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 2 months ago

I've seen enough nonsense to want to hear what GCP has to say about this before drawing any conclusions

Sure but not even a warning before shutting down their account?

egorfine• 2 months ago

First time?

It's google, come on.

DannyBee• 2 months ago

According to the timeline the account was suspended for 18 minutes total. That is fast enough that it could have simply been a bug in a Google rollout or something that made something think it was suspended when it wasn’t really.

If it was actually suspended the yeah it’s weird not to get an email.

maipen• 2 months ago

Two years ago I needed their support and they were so toxic that I just moved to vercel and told them to f off. But I wanted something similar for other services and then I found coolify. There’s absolutely no reason to use railway when you can use coolify.

pbronez• 2 months ago

Yeah I’m planning a similar transition for my personal infrastructure. Railway is super easy to get started with, dashboard and logs features are nice, but I’ve just lost confidence in it.

theobr• 2 months ago

I got details I shouldn't have. I can confidently say this one's 100% on Google, and I will be disappointed if Railway is unable to share more. There is literally nothing they could have done to prevent this aside from avoiding GCP entirely.

blensor2• 2 months ago

I saw your youtube video, and while I am generally a fan of the small guy against big corps, this was a bit much with all the "I am so afraid to say something but I have to" talk.

So I will hold my judgement until this has been disected a bit more

jamwise• 2 months ago

There goes a 9

ksajadi• 2 months ago

When you signup for Railway, they have uncommon way of making sure you have read and understood their T&C regarding abuse of their systems, including crypto mining, etc.

My guess is that many are abusing their free tier, causing them trouble with their service providers.

I take no joy in seeing Railway take a hit like this, even as a competitor, but free compute attracts all sorts of strange users. We've been there and decided early on to avoid free compute even it costs us our top of the funnel.

WhereIsTheTruth• 2 months ago

When your cloud depends on an other cloud

All these companies are fraud

cube002• 2 months ago

Railway "What we know so far: May 19th 2026": https://station.railway.com/community/what-we-know-so-far-ma...

mattbee• 2 months ago

The risk of an "upstream cloud provider" is not something you need to tolerate in your supplier of internet infrastructure!

zx8080• 2 months ago

For those who opened this link to read news about the real railway (with trains), it's not about it. Thank you for wasting my time!

r721• 2 months ago

We have resolved this incident and a post mortem is available here.
https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-a...
May 20, 07:57 UTC

https://status.railway.com/incident/I23M92U0

sschueller• 2 months ago

It should be possible to sue Google for damages in such cases. This isnt a network outage or service failure which I would consider part of ToS.

VladVladikoff• 2 months ago

What if the reason for their stuff being shut down was a payment issue like an expired credit card or maxed credit account? Unless I missed it skim reading their post I don’t see any information anywhere about their communications with Google.

Cthulhu_• 2 months ago

It's always possible to sue, but Google has good terms of service and lawyers - I'm 99% confident that a lawsuit would end up nowhere.

redwood• 2 months ago

I can assure you that Google will be giving them significant commercial incentives as an apology for this behind the scene

quentindanjou• 2 months ago

Railway say the incident is resolved but many are still down (returning 502): on our side, we had to manually trigger a redeploy to fix it but I believe it should have been triggered automatically by Railway and I can't understand how they can mark this as resolved while many are still down.

In total, down for >11 hours on our side.

gcr• 2 months ago

Railway owns our vendor choices, and we ultimately own this one. Your customers don't care whether the failure was Google or Railway; they see your product. Your uptime is our responsibility, and we'll keep delivering on it.

This is an excellent closing statement.

dang• 2 months ago

Thanks! The post-mortem is currently on the frontpage here:

Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770

brunooliv• 2 months ago

Having tried many of these hosting services to host/play with toy apps, DigitalOcean and Fly.io are both unparalleled GOATs.

paganel• 2 months ago

Apparently this has nothing to do with real-world trains and to the real-world rail system, at first, and reading the title alone, I had thought that some trains might have got stuck somewhere because of an IT (google cloud) failure. It's just another SaaS story.

jkogara• 2 months ago

Interestingly, upon logging in this morning I was presented with a new terms and conditions banner that required me to agree to not deploy a list of, to varying degrees, nefarious things (bots, torrents, "anything illegal", etc.). Is it likely that some of these workloads resulted in the auto restriction from GCP?

yomismoaqui• 2 months ago

Remember, the cloud is someone else's computer.

If that person turns it off you're screwed.

whh3• 2 months ago

There's that "automated action" again. Regardless of the architectural decision, it makes me incredibly uneasy relying on GCP if these types of things can happen.

danpalmer3• 2 months ago

7 minutes from bug filing to account restoration. This shouldn't have happened in the first place, but that's an excellent response time from the support team.

AbstractH24• 2 months ago

Did anyone discover any unexpected tools/wesbties use railway during this outage?

mooktakim• 2 months ago

So railway who provides cloud hosting uses another cloud hosting provider for vital services. Why use railway and not Google cloud directly?

daohieu91• 2 months ago

Small Railway customer here ($5-10/mo, Spring Boot service). My service stayed up the whole time on May 19 — I only learned about the incident from this post-mortem. "Detailed post-mortem about an incident the customer didn't even notice" is the strongest trust signal Railway could have given.

The broader concern though isn't Railway-specific: GCP's "we can suspend a downstream provider with no warning" policy is a structural risk for every IaaS-on-IaaS layer (Fly, Render, Northflank, etc.). Curious whether anyone here has seen contractual or technical mitigations beyond "have a second deploy target ready to switch to."

Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]

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