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Railway (PaaS) global outage
- jedbrooke 8mo agoOof, 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 8mo agoIndeed! Remote bricking of trains is perhaps a thing: https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-software-locks-that-caused-train-breakdowns https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-softw...
- esseph 8mo agoIt's also mandated by Congress in the US, it's called PTC. (Remote control)
- jasoncartwright 8mo agoPaaS
- et-al 8mo agoI thought this was about a global outage regarding actual trains, but it looks like Railway is a Heroku replacement.
- lysace 8mo agoAny news is good marketing if you're unknown.
- locknitpicker 8mo agoIs anyone expected to know what railway.com is?
- huydotnet 8mo agoContext: This is Railway the PaaS company, not your daily commute vehicle (which is good in general, still bad for many users, like me).
- colesantiago 8mo agoWhat 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 8mo agodispell the hate from your heart
- colesantiago 8mo agoQuestioning things is not 'hate' Mr Wolf.
- blibble 8mo agocould be worse could be called "entire" (https://entire.io/ https://entire.io/)
- imiric 8mo agoWorse would be x.com.
- vimda 8mo agoYou 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 8mo 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 8mo agoPossible empirical justification: Non-tech and more "typical" orgs (train companies...) don't spend lots of money on slick-sounding one-word .com domains.
- searls 8mo agolol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.
- ZoneZealot 8mo agoThat's a big yikes just after promoting themselves in the Jmail thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966562 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 8mo agoIDK, 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?
- huydotnet 8mo agoJoke 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 8mo agoRender.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 8mo agoVPS + 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 8mo 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.
- czhu12 8mo agoBeen building an open source version of railway at https://canine.sh https://canine.sh. Offers all the same features without the potential of a vendor lock-in / price gouging.
- Onavo 8mo agoThe 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/ci-cd/github/setup-app https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/dockerfile https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/dockerfile https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/overview 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.
- zachrip 8mo agoI actually think the title is misleading. I'm not sure actual existing deployments are affected? Seemingly just new ones are not working?
- TealMyEal 8mo agoit seemed to have been all deployments that had a browser facing interface. id say some cloudflair DNS config messup
- justjake 8mo agoRailway 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 8mo agoDoes anyone know if Railway operates its own cloud or if it's running off AWS/GCP/Azure/etc...
- jsheard 8mo agoThey 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 https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one
- autonomousErwin 8mo agoI think it has it's own "metal" services they're migrating customers to. Afaik they used GCP for "legacy" cloud services.
- spollo 8mo agoAll of these services are bundling the underlying AWS/GCP/etc resources in an easier to use package.
- railway-rahul 8mo agoThis is actually not true for us at Railway. It's our own metal.
- vintagedave 8mo agoMultiple services are receiving SIGTERM or shutdown signals. See dozens of support messages here: https://station.railway.com/questions/services-down-799f7bc1 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.
- ndneighbor 8mo agoHey 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.
- vintagedave 8mo agoThanks 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.
- jpcompartir 8mo agoThis 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 8mo agoIt 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.
- jpcompartir 8mo agoYeah 100% This won't change my decision, but it is still impeccable timing
- justjake 8mo agoHello! 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 https://status.railway.com/cmli5y9xt056zsdts5ngslbmp
- vintagedave 8mo agoHi 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.
- justjake 8mo agoTotally! 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!
- vintagedave 8mo ago
- iJohnDoe 8mo agoAffected 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. 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. 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.
- ndneighbor 8mo 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.)
- iJohnDoe 8mo agoThanks 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 8mo agoWasn't half the HN crowd repping this place yesterday when the Vercel CEO offered to pay for Jmail? Rough lol
- engelo_b 8mo ago[dead]
- arsalanb 8mo agoWe 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 8mo agoIf you don't pay for support, why complain if you don't get it?
- arsalanb 8mo agoI will charge you $100 to answer that question
- azebasse 8mo agoweak post mortem: https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-february-11-2026 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.