How the heck do these things happen, especially with companies with huge monthly spend? At my last job we had some suspicious workloads running on AWS and our TAM reached out to us before taking any action. Who wants to bet this was some AI automation gone wrong and because GCP seems to be allergic to actually contacting a human to get a response, this just sits in some support queue that outsourced workers look at after a few hours just to give a canned response?
Nothing surprises me with anything related to support on GCP. While we absolutely do not need them, I have been through no less than 12 different Account Executives over the last 6y and they're all ENTIRELY and COMPLETELY useless.
They all introduce themselves, beg me to setup a meeting w/them and some sort of engineering resource(s), and they come to a meeting with a canned slide deck that is so absurdly unrelated to us that I just laugh, and then the next time I hear from them it's because we have a new AE.
This is my most recent reply (right after Next '26):
> I really appreciate you reaching out; however, we have met with, I dunno at this point, more than a dozen GCP Account reps, execs, technical teams, etc over the years and there's little to no value for us or you, now or in the future. Please do feel free to invest your time on your other clients. We're good; truly.
I love GCP and its services; we have been very pleased with it over the years, but the human side of it? Fucking sucks and I just don't see why they even bother.
It has been 0 days since GCP has taken down a startup (again).
You see this at least once a year. Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.
In all seriousness, this is why we don't use them. They have the most ergonomic cloud of the big three, then absolutely murder it by having this kind of reputation.
On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP, unlike AWS/Azure who seem to go down catastrophically a couple of times per year.
The only anecdotal thing I've seen is we hired a vendor to do a pentest a few years ago, and they setup some stuff in an AWS account and that account got totally yeeted out of existence by AWS if memory serves.
As someone who runs some public APIs, the amount of spam from Railway IPs is insane. They have horrible abuse prevention. Hopefully this encourages them to improve their operations.
Is google allergic to humans or something? Cannot they just send an email or call the company before taking a wrecking ball to the entire company's infra? Are they stupid?
I will never leverage GCP in an enterprise setting, it's honestly amazing how hard they fumble the bag. Will be interesting to see when GCP support started working with them, from the updates there was an hour and change from when they identified the issue and GCP support was confirmed.
In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.
This is bad. Even their own website is down at railway.com. Looks like total dependency on google cloud. Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.
Does anyone know how this even happens inside the walls of google? Is it an automated process? How is such a (presumably) high revenue account just magically blocked without human intervention? I'm quite perplexed.
There would have been efforts to contact them, but it would have been via their contact method, aka the email they set it up with.
Common ways this happens? They are using a credit card to run their business with no backup payment method. Then the company's contact person is on vacation.
Honestly still insane to nuke a high-volume client's business after a single payment issue. There would be no reason for Google to believe that a single hiccup like that is evidence that they won't get paid and have to cut account access immediately.
At this point you can’t trust Google anymore, it keeps breaking things. Imagine having Google AI do this thins automatically. Will have apocalypse in in a day.
I've managed several accounts with GCP over the years and I've always maintained a great relationship with our contacts there. Some of these accounts were quite small, on the order of <$20k/mo, and even then we were kept abreast of anything that might be cause for concern. I always maintain a standing biweekly meeting with at least someone on the other side (account exec, technical staff, whatever) and I've yet to be blindsided by anything.
Is Google's communication good? No, not particularly. The only way something like TFA happens is if the relationship is neglected (by one or both parties). I'm not saying Railway did something wrong, but there are usually many flags and opportunities to correct long before drastic actions.
I get the impression that Railway plays fast and loose with a lot of their limits and resources and that Google may not be a fan of that.
Edit: would also like to say that if you put all your resources in one GCP project you are going to have a bad time. If you organize stuff over many projects it is very unlikely that they will ever take account wide action. I've had issues with, for example, a particular tenant's behavior, but it never jeopardized the other tenants.
How to handle domains? The rest is easy, but your domain registrar blocking you sounds like a pain. My current solution is to use a local small provider, just for the domain. Then if there is a problem with your play account it is out of any blast radius.
Looks like they were sold at the beginning of the year to a company without a Wikipedia page whose parent company doesn’t have one either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markmonitor
Acquired in November 2022 by Newfold Digital, it was later announced that the firm would be sold to Com Laude, a company owned by PX3 Partners.
PX3 stands for purpose, passion, and performance. It is a pan-European private equity firm with headquarters in London. It invests behind transformative themes and targets companies operating within select segments of the business services, consumer and leisure, and industrials sectors with strong business fundamentals.
How the heck do these things happen, especially with companies with huge monthly spend? At my last job we had some suspicious workloads running on AWS and our TAM reached out to us before taking any action. Who wants to bet this was some AI automation gone wrong and because GCP seems to be allergic to actually contacting a human to get a response, this just sits in some support queue that outsourced workers look at after a few hours just to give a canned response?
Nothing surprises me with anything related to support on GCP. While we absolutely do not need them, I have been through no less than 12 different Account Executives over the last 6y and they're all ENTIRELY and COMPLETELY useless.
They all introduce themselves, beg me to setup a meeting w/them and some sort of engineering resource(s), and they come to a meeting with a canned slide deck that is so absurdly unrelated to us that I just laugh, and then the next time I hear from them it's because we have a new AE.
This is my most recent reply (right after Next '26):
> I really appreciate you reaching out; however, we have met with, I dunno at this point, more than a dozen GCP Account reps, execs, technical teams, etc over the years and there's little to no value for us or you, now or in the future. Please do feel free to invest your time on your other clients. We're good; truly.
I love GCP and its services; we have been very pleased with it over the years, but the human side of it? Fucking sucks and I just don't see why they even bother.
It's because they're measured on something, unsure which metric, but it's definitely not how helpful they are to you.
It's Google. They let you use their services, but the moment you don't fit the norm, they suspend you.
It has been 0 days since GCP has taken down a startup (again).
You see this at least once a year. Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.
In all seriousness, this is why we don't use them. They have the most ergonomic cloud of the big three, then absolutely murder it by having this kind of reputation.
On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP, unlike AWS/Azure who seem to go down catastrophically a couple of times per year.
Yep, agree 100%. Such a stupid move on their behalf.
What was the reason GCP took down a startup previously?
AWS normally contacts you first.
Do they?
The only anecdotal thing I've seen is we hired a vendor to do a pentest a few years ago, and they setup some stuff in an AWS account and that account got totally yeeted out of existence by AWS if memory serves.
I’m fairly certain you are supposed to contact any vendor before attempting to penetrate hosts with authorization, not the other way around.
They better do. What is google doing?
It's all AI powered
As someone who runs some public APIs, the amount of spam from Railway IPs is insane. They have horrible abuse prevention. Hopefully this encourages them to improve their operations.
Is google allergic to humans or something? Cannot they just send an email or call the company before taking a wrecking ball to the entire company's infra? Are they stupid?
I will never leverage GCP in an enterprise setting, it's honestly amazing how hard they fumble the bag. Will be interesting to see when GCP support started working with them, from the updates there was an hour and change from when they identified the issue and GCP support was confirmed.
In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.
This is bad. Even their own website is down at railway.com. Looks like total dependency on google cloud. Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.
They run a decent amount of their own compute/bare metal server for customer workloads. But likely still had some critical dependencies on GCP.
Does anyone know how this even happens inside the walls of google? Is it an automated process? How is such a (presumably) high revenue account just magically blocked without human intervention? I'm quite perplexed.
There would have been efforts to contact them, but it would have been via their contact method, aka the email they set it up with.
Common ways this happens? They are using a credit card to run their business with no backup payment method. Then the company's contact person is on vacation.
Sign up for terms. It will get you payment terms!
Honestly still insane to nuke a high-volume client's business after a single payment issue. There would be no reason for Google to believe that a single hiccup like that is evidence that they won't get paid and have to cut account access immediately.
At this point you can’t trust Google anymore, it keeps breaking things. Imagine having Google AI do this thins automatically. Will have apocalypse in in a day.
one of the many reasons companies are cloud agnostic and dont want to get locked in
seriously, is it possible to trust GCP with critical data/services at this point if you're not a billion dollar company?
I'm exaggerating but someone said they got "auto banned"
what if that happens to a small account which hosts some really important data/services there?
I've managed several accounts with GCP over the years and I've always maintained a great relationship with our contacts there. Some of these accounts were quite small, on the order of <$20k/mo, and even then we were kept abreast of anything that might be cause for concern. I always maintain a standing biweekly meeting with at least someone on the other side (account exec, technical staff, whatever) and I've yet to be blindsided by anything.
Is Google's communication good? No, not particularly. The only way something like TFA happens is if the relationship is neglected (by one or both parties). I'm not saying Railway did something wrong, but there are usually many flags and opportunities to correct long before drastic actions.
I get the impression that Railway plays fast and loose with a lot of their limits and resources and that Google may not be a fan of that.
Edit: would also like to say that if you put all your resources in one GCP project you are going to have a bad time. If you organize stuff over many projects it is very unlikely that they will ever take account wide action. I've had issues with, for example, a particular tenant's behavior, but it never jeopardized the other tenants.
> what if that happens to a small account which hosts some really important data/services there?
Pray to @dang that you will make the front page of HN?
Even if you are a billion dollar company you still have problems like the Australian pension did. Google is just that bad.
https://blog.railway.com/p/series-b
Agreed. Railway are probably not far off a billion dollar company though!
Railway isnt far from being a billion dollar company, no ?
I wonder if someone has exploited a weird Google-safety automated process to report something on Railway which caused Google to block the whole thing.
Railway is back, but I’m not sure if I can trust keeping my projects there, so I’m going to migrate to another company.
Dupe - join the discussion started an hour ago instead of query string work (12 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827
I added the qs because it defaulted to a story from 3 months ago.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827
github got way more noise for less
Let me guess… Googler running AI agent in production that blocked this startup’s account.
TL;DR: putting all your eggs into one basket is bad, man.
Same applies to all the companies betting the farm on AWS.
How to handle domains? The rest is easy, but your domain registrar blocking you sounds like a pain. My current solution is to use a local small provider, just for the domain. Then if there is a problem with your play account it is out of any blast radius.
What do you mean by local small provider? A registrar on main street?
MarkMonitor
Any changes since acquisition?
Looks like they were sold at the beginning of the year to a company without a Wikipedia page whose parent company doesn’t have one either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markmonitor
-Edit-Private equity apparently https://px3partners.com