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Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-account-outage
Everytime I read something like this , I get nervous about the cloud providers and Google. Since this is a relatively high profile customer standards, shouldn't they explain what caused them to suspend the account ?
- farwaabbas 5mo agoTotally agreed the news like this makes me nervous too. For a high profile customer it feels like Google should give a clear explanation of what happened.
- esseph 5mo ago> For a high profile customer Are they really "high profile"? I've never heard of them until this incident or maybe the other one with the database. They just seem... Loud, publicly. And always about failure.
- OJFord 5mo agoIn this sort of community, fairly well-known yes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1779148800&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1715558400&page=0&prefix=true&query=Railway.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1779148800&dateRange=custom&...
- captn3m0 5mo agoThey publish some stats at https://railway.com/stats https://railway.com/stats 72M deploys from 3M customers across 10M services in the last month.
- raghavchamadiya 5mo agoThis is actually scary. If Google can suspend a company like Railway without warning, what chance does a smaller startup have? The lack of any human escalation path at Google Cloud has been a known problem for years. You'd think enterprise customers paying real money would at least get a phone call before getting shut down
- danjl 5mo agoThen you should be scared about every single online account you use, since they all have this same capability of suspension of your account. That's inherent in any service policy.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoGoogle seems to be the only one that actually does it, regularly, with no warning or comment, to other people. Google also spreads bans to accounts it deems related, so your personal Google account is likely to be deleted at the same time as your GCP account. That includes your Gmail address and your phone login and cloud storage. And vice versa. Company accounts have been deleted because an employee's personal account tripped Google's random number generator. Again, only Google does this.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoDoes Google have any customer big enough for it to give a fuck about?
- VirusNewbie 5mo agoAnthropic, Shopify, Apple, Uber, Temu, Spotify, Ebay, Paypal are all massive users who get tons of engineering support. Also if this rumor is true, they also get massive white glove engineering support: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/21/google-scores-six-year-meta-cloud-deal-worth-over-10-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/21/google-scores-six-year-meta-...
- qa3-tech 5mo agoYup, I think so. Makes one think about how dependent we are on cloud infra for core pieces versus supporting pieces of the architecture. They've probably negotiated some kind of private settlement.
- whh 5mo agoI've directly asked our account manager about it. It's pretty scary that we don't know what automated mechanisms could just cut us off.
- r_lee 5mo agoI really think Google underestimates the damage they've done to their reputation with these. These incidents are rare, but they're common enough where you can't trust them reliably anymore, and if that's the case, why would you pick them over other vendors? it's not like they're the only provider, or even the #1
- esseph 5mo ago> why would you pick them over other vendors? Their security track record is pretty exceptional compared to the other two.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoWould you want your vendors publicly disclosing potentially private reasons for an outage?
- hun3 5mo agoWith consent, yes.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoIs there any indication Railway has consented to such disclosure?
- mlmonkey 5mo agoBut Railway has been blaming GCP for the outage. Shouldn't GCP be given an opportunity to defend itself?
- ceejayoz 5mo agoIs that what you'd want your vendors to do?
- SoftTalker 5mo agoRailway hasn't placed any blame that I've seen. They've posted a timeline of what happened, without any speculation on causes.
- quietsegfault 5mo agoNo, that’s what the money is for.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- r_lee 5mo agoyes, especially since this didn't seem to be exactly "private" where it was anything specific, it was just some kind of automated system without a human in the loop
- cortesoft 5mo agoIt depends on what you mean by ‘need’. If you mean they should for PR purposes, I probably agree. If you are saying they should be required to by law, then no I disagree.
- RIMR 5mo agoI don't suspect anyone here is demanding laws be written requiring every single player in any SaaS outage to make a public statement immediately following an event like this. That's an odd thing to state your preference on. But, given that this incident unjustly caused real damages to another company, I am pretty certain that Google will be required to make some sort of response to this, and if it ends up in the courts, it will be public.
- RickS 5mo agoGoogle has given a public statement about this category of incident (to wit: cloud provider imperils customer's operations by way of automated decision deliberately designed to withhold recourse). That statement is the last 15 or so years.
- r_lee 5mo agoI think so. I'm a GCP user and I'm afraid of hosting workloads there now. I've heard too many nightmare stories, and I thought Google would be proper and thus not be infested with these kind of problems that cheaper providers are known for. Maybe AWS is the only player in town now? I don't know. Google doesn't instill confidence with these incidents, same with those cases of insurmountable bills caused by simple mistakes where there should be a way for smaller customers to cap usage.
- dogscatstrees 5mo agoWhat about Azure?
- skinner927 5mo agoDo you care about uptime and security?
- joezydeco 5mo agohttps://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
- 1attice 5mo agoHonestly the best counterattack Iran could make rn would be somehow convincing the Pentagon to move everything to Azure
- cute_boi 5mo agoRailway can simply move to other service. We all know Google in unreliable, so why should google give public statement? Thanks.
- ZiiS 5mo agoI really don't see how they can. The business and usage details of their clients are confidential. We have their word that ToS where violated, I don't really think they should say more. This needs to go to arbitration.
- ClarityJones 5mo agoArbitration is an inefficient and unproductive process. I suppose that may be what the parties chose, but the public will likely never know what happened and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again. Things like these are better resolved in courts, with res judicata, precedent, and visibility so that legislators can fix statutes where necessary.
- esseph 5mo ago> and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again You're already placing blame here. We don't know the details other than what Railway has said.
- ClarityJones 5mo agoI think that's true regardless of what happened. If Railway did something wrong, then letting that be known may help other customers avoid the same ~mistake.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoIf the ToS was actually violated and the suspension was legitimate, they wouldn't have reinstated Railway's account after five hours or whatever it was. Their behaviour is already a mea culpa.
- esseph 5mo agoI disagree. They could have done this to themselves and instead of fessing up, are placing the blame on an entity as a scapegoat. Is that possible? Absolutely. Has Google also done similar things before? Absolutely. I certainly wouldn't bet my house on either possiblity.
- pirsquare 5mo agoBeing an advocate for GCP all these years, I can only say the earlier you get out of it, the safer it is for your business. All it takes is for their automated system to go haywire, and you can say bye bye to all your goodwill and customers. Go look at twitter how many customers are blaming railway. Founder had history getting screwed by GCP, yet still choose to depend on them. You can't rely your business on GCP. Honestly, this is the most silly way to kill your own business. For context, copied from my post 3 years ago. March 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite As a 4 years customer, our production severs have been suspended by Google Cloud because we didn't fill up some information on-time. Contacted support but they expect us to wait for 24-48 hours to get it resolved while all our servers are down. Anyone linked with someone powerful in google cloud can help? ====== - Running production on google cloud for 4 yrs with my startup. 100% legit SaaS business. - Always pay bills on-time no issue. Good customer never open tickets, ask for help or what just quietly pay my bills each month. - Our servers was abruptly suspended yesterday midnight and my whole business is now down for > 10hrs. - We run a SaaS business that other ecommerce stores rely on and have hundreds of paying merchants. - My customers have been grilling me and I don't feel gcloud's trust and safety team understand/care how urgent the issue is. ====== Why were our servers suspended? Because we didn't fill up information in time? - See https://imgur.com/a/x0Y3RJl https://imgur.com/a/x0Y3RJl - Apparently they dropped us an email 10 days back that I missed out - Titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" with no indication of suspension or what in title. - Given the number of subprocessor "Important" emails they send it's too easy to miss out the email. - 10 days gone by and our servers were abruptly shutdown with zero suspension notification or what. - We've been paying $400-$700/mo for the past 4 yrs consistently and they shut us down because we didn't fill up some information? When I tried to ask them to at least temporarily get our servers back while the verification is ongoing, I didn't get any answers. Google Cloud have zero empathy for customers. It's not like my account got suspended for fradulent issue or what. It's suspended because I didn't fill up some information on-time and they don't even allow me to temporarily reactivate my services or what. Especially when I had to wait for hours to get their team to verify my details before I can get my servers back. You can't trust them with your business. Don't run any production stuffs with Google Cloud, ever.
- literallyroy 5mo agoThe company I work for uses GCP and we preciously had intermittent CloudSQL connection errors for a few hours. We reached out and they resolved it after a day or so and said there was a minor incident but I don’t think it was ever publically reported.
- LogicCraft678 5mo agoThis is exactly why people get nervous about platform risk
- gdulli 5mo agoWe already know the explanation. It's fundamental to their business model and continued existence to automate everything, false positives be damned, and they don't care about all the people who roll snake eyes on a given day. Because everyone just stays and keeps using them.
- PrairieFire 5mo agoYep. Google doing Google things. Not everyone stays and just keeps using them though, we're actively planning to remove GCP from our primary workloads now and will cut our spend to about 1/10 of current as we keep them in the stack as a cold multi-cloud failover target only.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoPost your ask in the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484
- nickdothutton 5mo agoGoogle really should publish a flow diagram for how they decide to turn off someone's business.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoIt would just be a control flow graph of rand(3)
- tomComb 5mo agoI can't believe that readers of HN actually think that that is how it does or should work. Google/GCP can only make very general statements and in this case we want more than that. They need to tell Railway and Railway needs to tell us, or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them. Either way, we need to hear about this from Railway.
- jarym 5mo agoI think there’s been far too many Google/GCP ‘suspensions with no human in the loop’ that Google does need to put out a statement about their practices.
- fidotron 5mo agoIt's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off. The bigger point though is Google really need to flag any business account as not subject to these suspensions until checked into by several humans. Back when I had a team that used a lot of App Engine they would even call us when we caused all their pagers to go off, and then conspire to keep the lights on while things got fixed. It's sad they have ended up like this.
- deathanatos 5mo ago> It's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off. That case is called: > or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them. I'm not paying you (which let's face it, that's what an NDA is) just to find out why you messed up about as severely as one can imagine. In theory, there was a contract here: $ for cloud services, and the rug got pulled. One should get a very clear, and very apologetic explanation as to why, with no strings attached, or one should be voting with their wallet. Now, whether Railway will do any of that, who knows.
- roxolotl 5mo agoOf course it doesn’t work this way but why shouldn’t it? It doesn’t because Google is a massive company and could kill dozens of Railways before they notice an issue to their bottom line. However in a world where companies care I’d expect them to make a statement.
- dlcarrier 5mo agoFor privacy, B2B providers often won't even acknowledge that any given company has an account, let alone publish information about that account's standing.
- lacker 5mo agoIt's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things. To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railway themselves probably do host some spammers and hackers, and they have their own systems for dealing with it. So, it's quite possible that according to the Google team, Railway violated the terms of something or other, and according to the Railway team, they did not, and now everyone has to argue about it. But who knows, this is just me guessing based on some experience running a PaaS that itself was running on top of AWS.
- fakedang 5mo agoRailway's system for dealing with hackers is a $5/mo fee gate. Railway plays around vibecoding as they go along, and their tech practices don't inspire confidence either. Unlike other PaaS like Render or Heroku, I doubt Railway has adequate rate-limiting to stop bad apples.
- lacker 5mo agoYeah, and rate-limiting is only one of the things a PaaS needs to handle, to avoid looking like a bad actor to the underlying platform. The trickiest thing to handle is people using your PaaS to host malware, because: 1. There may be no simple rule of thumb like "suddenly using tons of bandwidth" 2. Bad actors can open up so many accounts, you have to close them automatically 3. Malware can infect a good actor, who is unaware or struggling to deal with it
- smartician 5mo agoIf they're a PaaS, isn't it insane for them to run their own infrastructure and the customer workloads under the same cloud account?
- zarzavat 5mo agoGCP is basically just a toy. If you're hosting something important there you should probably not do that. It works as a Plan B, but by no means should Google be your Plan A. I don't know what happened in this case, there's a chance it wasn't Google's fault but it doesn't matter, Google already lost all benefit of the doubt long ago.
- Salgat 5mo agoYeah this is the main argument I have for AWS. Is it the best tech-wise? Arguably not, but they have real support you can contact on a moment's notice, they'll even reach out ahead of time if they suspect something is seriously wrong.
- ecshafer 5mo agoShopify is all on GCP and works well.
- zarzavat 5mo agoShopify has $11 billion dollars in revenue. I assume that buys them at least an email address of a human at Google. Nobody doubts Google's engineering ability. It's their soft skills that are lacking. Google is culturally unable to understand the concept of customers.
- cross 5mo agoXoogler here. This hits hard; right on the kidney. That is a huge problem at Google: "we're google; we know what you want and need better than you do." That and an unshakable confidence in their own infallibility. When I was there, I remember saying, "we do some cool stuff, but always remember that hubris is the death of empires."
- lesuorac 5mo agoTbh, even if "you know what somebody wants better than they do" it's a moot point since people pay for what they _think_ they want.
- pugworthy 5mo ago> Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action. This action extended to many accounts within Google Cloud. As this was a platform-wide action, there was no proactive outreach to individual customers prior to the restriction. I'm interpreting that bit from Railway's blog to mean it wasn't just them that was impacted.
- continueops_com 5mo agoThis makes me so mad, Google is not the first i've seen doing this (AWS, Upwork, Twilio) - and the cheek to say precisely nothing about why. If you're a buyer of cloud services right, i bet old-school on-prem is looking as tempting as an actress to a teenager rn. Every regulated firm running on GCP is going to spend Monday explaining to their board how their resilience plan accounts for a hyperscaler that operates this opaquely. The compliance paperwork is the easy bit - the honest answer is we trusted that a hyperscaler would behave like a utility and they didn't. So yes - they owe a statement. The whole point of paying hyperscaler prices is the assumption you won't wake up suspended with no explanation.
- sergiotapia 5mo agoI don't understand how you see what Google did to Railway and think you know what I'll build my business on GCP. #1. you will most likely never be as big a customer as railway. if they did it them, you're fucked. #2. if shit hits the fan, even a company as large as railway can get no human being on the phone. that's insane. how is gcp still a thing after this event? if you're in charge of tech at your company, how do you stomach choosing this? how do you defend your choice to your CEO?
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoMaybe if it was a US Gov site going dark, and Congress got involved. Maybe then. Maybe not.
- iLoveOncall 5mo ago> Since this is a relatively high profile customer standards This is a small unknown startup.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoGoogle is a lawnmower, just like Larry Ellison. You don't expect the lawnmower to give a public statement about why it chopped your hand off.
- dang 5mo agoRelated ongoing thread: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770 - May 2026 (144 comments) Previously: Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484 - May 2026 (344 comments)
- SamiahAman 5mo agoNo warning, no email, nothing. Just you find out your business is down the same way your users do. Google needs to explain this.
- andrewinardeer 5mo ago> Railway's GCP account manager engaged directly This would have been an amazing conversation to witness.
- holografix 5mo agoStop calling Google Cloud, “Google”. Completely different group of people, culture and incentives. Google Cloud is another company under Alphabet.
- geor9e 5mo agoThey brand it Google, trade it under the ticker GOOG, and are run by the same CEO.
- stronglikedan 5mo agoShould they give a statement? Maybe. Should they be required to? Not if they don't want to. Should they be expected to? Historically, nope.
- joehacker 5mo ago[dead]
- solarkraft 5mo agoI’m surprised when I hear about anyone depending on GCP. Why would you do that? Seriously, what are some good reasons to choose GCP over vendors that have demonstrated to be much more reliable? Are they much cheaper than the alternatives? Do they have unbeatable features?
- Oras 5mo agoThey offer $250k credit for startups, that's the only reason I can think of. You use them for a start, and stuck there.
- jjsquaredbakery 5mo ago[flagged]
- late_night_fix 5mo agoRailway can only share their side of the story,while Google stays silent due to policy constraints.The assymmetry makes it hard to evaluate what actually happened,even if both parties acted correctly.
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- rhythmshahriar 5mo ago[flagged]
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- Mariajaved906 4mo ago[flagged]