Subsequent thread: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770
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>https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-a...
>May 20, 07:57 UTC
https://status.railway.com/incident/I23M92U0
Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770
This is an excellent closing statement.
> May 19, 22:22 UTC - P0 ticket filed with Google Cloud. Railway's GCP account manager engaged directly.
But that's not what will happen. Google will offer an apology (perhaps even a public one), a giant pile of account credit, and a pinky promise not to do it again. Railway will accept it and hmmm and haw internally about whether to decrease their reliance on GCP, and then when they calculate the cost of going in on other clouds more heavily (or their own metal), they'll just think harder about weird failure modes.
In total, down for >11 hours on our side.
Regardless of how it happened, for me, this is the straw that broke the camel's back.
Someone is just asking to get Google's side and explaining why they want that, which seems reasonable since we're in a post where Google is being punched/blamed for this, and it sounds like it isn't Railways first questionable outage.
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.
But TheRegister did reach out to Google and they have not replied yet: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/05/20/google-cloud...
That is exactly what GCP should do: not comment on a customer's issues. Even when it's due to abuse from a customer, which might even be the case.
Oof.
So I will hold my judgement until this has been disected a bit more
https://x.com/theo/status/2056946993407369300
https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2056946993407369300
Couldn't find it on yt.
Either way, I agree with blensor here, there's no new info on the railway incident itself but mostly about google's direction towards antigravity.
About the author of the video mentioning that he's scared, unfortunately, that has always been the case with Journalism/columnists etc, speaking ill of the platform which you use to sell your wares tends to backfire. Wish him all the luck
Sure but not even a warning before shutting down their account?
If it was actually suspended the yeah it’s weird not to get an email.
It's google, come on.
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.
December 2021: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/aws-outage-takes-do...
June 2023: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-52
October 2025: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/amazon-web-services-outage-t...
Each of these were massive outages impacting very large services across the web.
With that said, I would not say few companies rely on GCP. Search for "GCP" in this month's HN hiring thread. There are 23 hits, more than Azure's 21. AWS has 90 hits, which I guess shows its sheer dominance in the startup space. But these figures more or less agree with my intuition of the major clouds being AWS/GCP/Azure.
GCP is the world's third largest cloud provider, and has around half of AWS' market share. Claiming no one uses it reads like Yogi Berra's "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
Then there's Anthropic...huge user.
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
While its possible to to isolate the effects, judging by how many things stop working when there is an AWS failure a lot of people fail to do that. I think the shit of responsibility to AWS removes the incentive to put effort into resilience against AWS failure.
The outage in the linked article appears to have been resolved in 4-5 hours.
They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.
Your cloud provider blocking your business from running is far worse.
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.
It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.
AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.
I know some workloads help to be colocated but all these places are connected by fiber and every cloud has a worldwide CDN it seems.
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.
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
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.
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.
Cuz otherwise you look like a threat actor.
That’s assuming your vendor was pentesting AWS systems. If you meant you hired a vendor to pentest your own systems on AWS, that’s of course a totally different matter.
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.
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?
This was less "Oh look, a rare edge case that was easy to miss!" and more "We don't bother putting guardrails into critical systems. Oops!"
It's called single point of failure, and it's the nightmare of everyone who was ever in charge of safety.
Weekends and public holidays are a thing, plus it’s quite common for companies to shut down for 2 weeks over Christmas.
There’s a lot of opportunity for mistakes or malicious actions to happen at times that won’t be discovered for a while.
Because in case of a compromise/unauthorized access that's exactly what you don't want to happen
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.
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.
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.
> Around 22:20 UTC, our Google Cloud account was placed into a "restricted" status hence removing all of our cloud overflow VMs, our CloudSQL instance, and our API.
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.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Then there's the platform game theory. If you adopt you add friction which reduces signups, and there will always be a competitor who would risk the 10x fraud increase in order to capture 100x the market. Railway has seen hyper-growth because it's so easy to run from, and is recommended by, coding agents[1].
The solutions are here already just not well implemented or understood - probabilistic fraud detection, resource limits, service and automation limits, standard gov identity verification as a signal, enterprise sales channels with human relationships, etc.
There are tradeoffs with each platform choice that just aren't well understood. Most users shop on price and DX and don't see the abuse infra or problem until it hits them.
Google and GCP have a problem where they completely cook users who get flagged in their automated fraud net (this isn't news - or shouldn't be)
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...
[1] and the problems that come with providing that simple interface, like sometimes dropping prod
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
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."
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.
> 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
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.
AWS may have data centers[0] go[1] down[2], but that's within expected bounds of standard ops.
[0] https://hooks.slack.com/services/TJ7HQS7FC/B0B5S7UTBJ4/PUHIC...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/21/what-caused-amazon...
[2] https://netflixtechblog.com/lessons-netflix-learned-from-the...
Obviously a fiasco but I’m not prepared to call them liars when it could be an honest mistake.
Google really need to improve their support team. 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.
They must’ve upgraded them to Gemini 3.5 by now.
This seems to be by design.
In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.
You should also read the story, as you're perpetuating a false version of it: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248
Not sure too many VCs would be cool with deep redundancy when there's more features to build to bring in more customers instead.
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.
i actually built a good plan out of those horror stories for my companies.
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".
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".
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?
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.
Sign up for terms. It will get you payment terms!
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.
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.
I'd be curious to know why Railway's account was suspended. Was it a similar payment issue or something else?
But most likely, it's just automations in place without an appropriate human override coupled with gross negligence.
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.
Railway dot com
Has nothing to do with railways.
I wish software people would get their own words.
"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"
https://x.com/JustJake
… on the Unix command line …
… to a cloud older than AWS…
… if only …
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.
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?
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.
Pray to @dang that you will make the front page of HN?
Agreed. Railway are probably not far off a billion dollar company though!
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.
If that person turns it off you're screwed.
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.
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.
Who deleted it?
All these companies are fraud
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.
Looks like they were sold at the beginning of the year to a company without a Wikipedia page whose parent company doesn’t have one either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markmonitor
-Edit-Private equity apparently https://px3partners.com
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.