Everyone is eager to point a finger at Google, but I've been a user of Railway for a while now, and I've seen enough nonsense to want to hear what GCP has to say about this before drawing any conclusions. Let's just say Railway has had problems like this before, and the way their team handles them does not inspire any confidence.
Regardless of how it happened, for me, this is the straw that broke the camel's back.
> Let's just say Railway has had problems like this before, and the way their team handles them does not inspire any confidence.
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.
> Railway are alleging that this affected many GCP accounts, (...)
From what I've read in other comments, the root cause seems to have been automatic account suspension as an anti-abuse measures.
It's also telling that Railway describes the root cause simply as "Google Cloud Platform has suspended Railway's production account." It then mentions this
> 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. 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.
The why is conspicuously absent, but this sort of sweep is indeed consistent with anti-abuse measure.
If this is the case I would be cautious in accusing a cloud provider of wrongdoing. Many things need to go awfully wrong to trigger this sort of alarm, and I'm not talking about GCP's anti-abuse system. In fact, it's telling that no reputable, well established business is reporting any impact. The whole point of any anti-abuse system is to suspend accounts that are caught engaging in some sort of abuse.
another ditto from me, albeit anecdotal again. Railway dev teams play fast and loose with sprinkles of vibe coding everywhere on top. There's 'oops yea bear with us we are still a startup' and then there's railway.
i mean even google and aws are not without sin on this one. maybe wait for an RCA before punching someone who is currently down. theres a reason classy people do "hugops" when a competitor goes down, regardless of reputation.
Personally, I don't see this as people punching someone who's down. This is the sort of real life experience and necessary context from actual technical users that I come to HN comments for.
Someone is just asking to get Google's side and explaining why they want that, which seems reasonable since we're in a post where Google is being punched/blamed for this, and it sounds like it isn't Railways first questionable outage.
Two years ago I needed their support and they were so toxic that I just moved to vercel and told them to f off.
But I wanted something similar for other services and then I found coolify.
There’s absolutely no reason to use railway when you can use coolify.
Yeah I’m planning a similar transition for my personal infrastructure. Railway is super easy to get started with, dashboard and logs features are nice, but I’ve just lost confidence in it.
When I've written similar services, there was a (low) hard cap on how many fraud decisions they could action before they quit and paged. If we were getting hit with a wave of something, a human had to temporarily bump that limit.
I got details I shouldn't have. I can confidently say this one's 100% on Google, and I will be disappointed if Railway is unable to share more. There is literally nothing they could have done to prevent this aside from avoiding GCP entirely.
I saw your youtube video, and while I am generally a fan of the small guy against big corps, this was a bit much with all the "I am so afraid to say something but I have to" talk.
So I will hold my judgement until this has been disected a bit more
Either way, I agree with blensor here, there's no new info on the railway incident itself but mostly about google's direction towards antigravity.
About the author of the video mentioning that he's scared, unfortunately, that has always been the case with Journalism/columnists etc, speaking ill of the platform which you use to sell your wares tends to backfire. Wish him all the luck
According to the timeline the account was suspended for 18 minutes total. That is fast enough that it could have simply been a bug in a Google rollout or something that made something think it was suspended when it wasn’t really.
If it was actually suspended the yeah it’s weird not to get an email.
Regardless of how it happened, for me, this is the straw that broke the camel's back.