- Google Cloud suspended Railway’s account after suspicious activity
- The hour-long outage affected all rail workloads across all clouds
- Jernbane takes over ownership of the inspection due to a technical dependency
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company Railway has accused Google Cloud of abruptly suspending its account without prior notice, leading to an hour-long outage.
The company, which counts over three million users hosting around 10 million services, APIs and databases, identified a problem around 22:20 UTC on 19 May 2026, which was not fully corrected until about eight hours later at 06:14.
While the company determined the cause and attempted to restore services, customers were experiencing errors such as ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login errors and inability to access the dashboard.
Technical dependence ultimately caused the Railway’s discontinuance
Because the network control plane API was affected (which is hosted on Google Cloud), all Railway workloads across all clouds were affected, returning 503 and 404 errors. Existing workloads stayed up for about 15 minutes before caches started to expire.
The register reports Railway spends an eight-figure sum each year with Google Cloud (potentially upwards of $1m each month), even after moving parts of its infrastructure to co-location services after problems in 2024 and 2025.
Railway claims that it took Google Cloud nearly an hour to engage after the incident happened. “We are furious and still trying to get all the details,” said solutions engineer Angelo Saraceno. It is worth noting that the suspension of the account was lifted at 22:29, just nine minutes after trouble began.
The company has since published a detailed blog post revealing everything it knows about the incident, patched together with information from Google Cloud.
The report confirms that the outage was part of a broader, automated review by Google that affected other Google Cloud Platform accounts without prior notice. TechRadar Pro has learned that Google Cloud identified an increase in abusive activity, particularly cryptocurrency mining, across a large number of accounts, and that it had previously warned affected users of suspicious activity and potential lockouts accordingly.
Exclusive dependence is a bad idea
Railway has taken full ownership of its oversight and has announced immediate changes, including removing the network plane API’s sole reliance on GCP.
“If any of the connections go out, there’s always a way between the clouds,” explained Support Engineer Chandrika Khanduri and Agent Experience GM Cody De Arkland.
“We have invested in resilience as a result of past incidents which have helped us manage the impact,” the company added, hinting at past problems. While it promises to have learned from past mistakes, ultimately it was Railways’ responsibility to eliminate its GCP-only reliance, which could have prevented widespread impact this time around.
“Your customers don’t care if the fault was Google or Railway; they see your product. Your uptime is our responsibility and we will continue to deliver on it,” the company concluded.
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