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.
This is sort of the problem with these new-age internet companies. The contracts are incredibly hostile. Most TOS you see amount to "you have no rights and we can fuck you up the ass"
Google is a B2C company so I'm sure some of that culture transfers over to B2B relations, but I'm speculating. Maybe the contracts are more normal for B2B.
bastawhiz is probably right in that Google will offer some credits and an apology, and Railway will reduce their dependence (probably), rather than a lawsuit. And I doubt Railway wants to be on the bad side of one of the few big cloud providers. But I'd be surprised if Railway didn't have a good argument to make for compensation or a lawsuit.
The incident report says this was a platform wide automated action. This argument falls apart.
Azure noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of getting more of our business.
Google noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of keeping more of our business.
This is just a reminder that your multi-cloud strategy doesn't have to be 'deploy everything across multiple clouds'; it can even just be 'make it obvious that you have leverage'.
1. This isn't self service GCP, this is an enterprise contract. You don't build your medium sized business on a provider without one. Once you're a certain size, you don't get binding arbitration, you go to court in Santa Clara.
2. The TOS for GCP is very clear about an injunctive relief carve out:
> 14.11 Equitable Relief. Nothing in this Agreement will limit either party's ability to seek equitable relief.
3. This (according to the incident report) wasn't Railway being targeted specifically, it was a platform wide automated action. That's gross negligence, and the limitation of liability caps on Google's side of the agreement may not even be enforceable.
I'm sure there are/will be discussions privately between the two to figure out a resolution.
