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.
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 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.
AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of how it happened, for me, this is the straw that broke the camel's back.
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...
So I will hold my judgement until this has been disected a bit more
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.
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?
It's called single point of failure, and it's the nightmare of everyone who was ever in charge of safety.
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.
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.
>https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-a...
>May 20, 07:57 UTC
Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204770
This is an excellent closing statement.
In total, down for >11 hours on our side.
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?
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.
Agreed. Railway are probably not far off a billion dollar company though!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
… on the Unix command line …
… to a cloud older than AWS…
… if only …
> The fact of the matter is, you simply cannot build a cloud on someone else’s cloud.
Indeed…
You should also read the story, as you're perpetuating a false version of it: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248
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".
"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"
Railway dot com
Has nothing to do with railways.
I wish software people would get their own words.
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.
In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.
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."
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.
If that person turns it off you're screwed.
All these companies are fraud
Who deleted it?
