Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

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Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

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

Simon Sharwood

Simon<br>Sharwood

APAC Editor

Published<br>wed 20 May 2026 // 05:37 UTC

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage.<br>Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud.<br>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.”

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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.

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“Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added.<br>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.<br>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.<br>“We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule.

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Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.”<br>Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation!<br>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.”

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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.<br>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.<br>Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper.<br>Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end.<br>“Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®

saas<br>cyber-resilience<br>outage<br>google cloud platform<br>off-prem

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