Off-Prem

This is the service we get when we spend $10m plus? asks automated code deployment outfit

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage.

Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud.

It’s struggled to do that for the last few hours and the company’s status page tells the sad tale, starting with an update time-stamped May 19, 22:29 UTC that said the company is “investigating a widespread service disruption.” The incident meant “Users may be experiencing errors including ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.”

Angelo Saraceno, a solutions engineer for Railway, told The Register the company noticed a problem at around 22:00 UTC. He said the company’s resources appeared to have been deleted and simply not to exist. Google has since explained it suspended the account, making Railway’s resources invisible.

“Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added.

We are livid and still trying to get all the details

Ironically, in 2024 Railway decided to shift much of its infrastructure into colocation services after Google “caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business.” Those problems resurfaced in 2025 after more trouble at Google Cloud that again impacted Railway’s services. 

But Railway kept its control plane in Google Cloud and still has a dependency on databases that run there. Those resources see it spend an eight-figure sum each year on the G-Cloud . Yet Saraceno said when this incident commenced, it took an hour for Google’s support team to engage.

“We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule.

Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation!

Railway’s most recent status update, at the time of writing, is an 03:05 UTC May 20 missive that states “More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.”

The Register has contacted Google to ask if and why it blocked Railway’s account. You know the drill: We will update this story if we receive more than corporate platitudes.

Cloud providers might rightly block a customer’s account over unpaid bills or inappropriate use – but usually do so after giving fair warning. Railway told us this incident came out of the blue.

Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper.

Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end.

“Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®