Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

Jgrubb

Railway has not had the best month in the tech press have they? And in both cases it was an automated process belonging to some other party that put them there, damaging their reputation. I was going to talk to our google rep about their killing the Gemini cli but this is way more concerning.

AlfieJones

This isn’t the first time Google Cloud has seriously messed with a customer’s account: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

rurban

Google, the new Microsoft!

ChrisArchitect

Related discussion during the incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484

tptacek

Duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484

stefan_

It's reassuring to know they will ban a million dollar enterprise customer just like they will ban your GMail of 20 years.

ryanSrich

Question: for a smaller SaaS tool, or even internal product. If a team doesn't want to manage AWS or another IaaS provider, what are the best alternatives for the following 1.) Vercel - having a bad month 2.) Supabase - having a bad month 3.) Railway - now having a bad month

ibejoeb

I've been getting serious, recently, about moving all my workloads to equipment that I control in datacenters with which I have professional relationships. It's less expensive, easier, and this kind of nonsense doesn't happen. These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products. Footguns everywhere, pricing that is impossible to forecast or reason about, broken APIs, and automated self destruction. Then you have third-party providers sitting on top of them, adding another layer of each antifeature. Crazy.

Animats

"Finally, we are in planning to remove Google Cloud services from our data plane’s hot path, and keeping them only for secondary/failover." That's pretty clear. Google can no longer be trusted as a B2B service provider.

teraflop

> May 19, 22:10 UTC - Our automated monitoring detected API health check failures and paged our on-calls, who started investigating the issue. > At 22:20 UTC on May 19, Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action. If the timestamps are accurate, what was causing the errors 10 minutes before the account was suspended? The simplest explanation is just that one or the other of these timestamps is wrong, which wouldn't be a big deal. But if the timestamps aren't known with certainty, it seems very odd to include them in the writeup as though they are certain, even though they are very obviously inconsistent with each other.

indrex

Had similar experience with GCP. Terminated VMs six times, and responded zero times.

theredleft

back to on-prem

in_a_society

Google has a culture problem. This is not something that can change easily nor will it change when it’s not recognized as being an issue within their organization. Between my peer c-suites, the conversation is that GCP cannot even be in the consideration set until such a time as a several-year period has elapsed without this kind of incident.

tcdent

The interesting and yet-to-be-explained part is why google flagged the account? Put all the timestamps you want in the post mortem about what you observed, but you haven't addressed the root cause. The "this doesn't make sense" part of the story likely has a real explanation that nobody wants to reveal yet.

majdalsado

Unfortunately we had to make emergency migration off to Azure yesterday due to this. Thankfully our DB was not hosted on Railway and we were back up in a couple hours. As much as we loved the simplicity they provided us, there's just been too many mishaps and shortcomings for us to continue running a B2B enterprise app on their infrastructure. Sad day :(

Bender

I've read all the threads and their main page and I still don't really understand what this service is. Is this like a commercial alternative to Gerrit? What do people use this for? I'm not a developer, just curious what this is.

delduca

Flagged by some AI automation.

shwetanshu21

This should be a warning to anyone running GCP. They suspend accounts left right and centre without even thinking about what they're doing. It seems like they use Gemini 3.1 Pro to run their production decisions. TK has a history of absolutely destroying the culture of the place like in OCI and has done something similar in GCP from what I've heard. GCP and Google are completely different entities with how they work. Don't expect Google quality from the name. It's just like those old brands which now have cheap licensed products like Nokia (An exaggeration I know but not far from truth). Not only that they are known to shut off their services randomly giving you like 6 months to migrate. They have lots of engineers not doing anything, so they put them on migrating internal users off those services, most of their clients don't. There was a brilliant article on this by an ex-GCP employee that I can't find right now. Avoid GCP like plague if you are serious about your business. Edit: Gemini (unironically) found the article on this, a very good read: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

AtNightWeCode

So, what was the reason for the account suspension. Why did it happen? I know Google can be a bit stupid with their automatons but I am bit skeptical here. There are sites more critical than Railway hosted on GCP.

corndoge

> Your customers don't care whether the failure was Google or Railway; they see your product. Refreshing. So tired of businesses blaming their vendors. Oh it wasn't us spamming you text messages and emails, it was Shopify. Oh, our delivery guarantee said 2 days and it's been a week? That's not us, it's UPS. I don't care. I didn't pay UPS or Shopify. I paid you.