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Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

blog.railway.com

61–70 of 279 posts

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#61
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That‘s the point where Google tells you they won’t tell you the exact reason because of security reasons

Exactly this, which is the problem with all modern accounts. No person to talk to so you can understand what happened and maybe fix it.

They most definitely have a person to talk to. They're not the largest Google Cloud user by far, but they are large enough to have human account reps.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#62
What drives Google to apply these actions so completely and immediately, versus a more deliberate approach, with notification and delay before action, manual review for paying customers, or a warning to resolve within X hours/days? Once or twice could be errors or bad implementation, but these can't explain away the pattern.

It would seem that Google's counsel has deemed that whenever _____ is detected, the company must immediately and completely sever the business relationship. What is that driving concern? Is it sanctions enforcement? CSAM? Something else?

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#63
post #50
post #33

The interesting and yet-to-be-explained part is why google flagged the account? Put all the timestamps you want in the post mortem about what you observed, but you haven't addressed the root cause. The "this doesn't make sense" part of the story likely has a real explanation that nobody wants to reveal yet.

That‘s the point where Google tells you they won’t tell you the exact reason because of security reasons

They also don't want to tell you because then they have to put rules and cannot ban people arbitrarily.

Giving reasons is putting accountability on Google and they don't want that.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#64
post #33

The interesting and yet-to-be-explained part is why google flagged the account? Put all the timestamps you want in the post mortem about what you observed, but you haven't addressed the root cause. The "this doesn't make sense" part of the story likely has a real explanation that nobody wants to reveal yet.

Shouldn't Google answer this if they are unhappy with this incident report? Are we even sure that Railway knows?

I seriously doubt Railway knows. That's the MO for Google and others, suspend account without explanation.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#65
post #60
post #15

"Finally, we are in planning to remove Google Cloud services from our data plane’s hot path, and keeping them only for secondary/failover." That's pretty clear. Google can no longer be trusted as a B2B service provider.

Meta is no different. I know a company that had their OAuth app on Meta rendered completely unusable just because one of their employees (a dev) had their personal Facebook account banned by Meta for no reason. They tried to escalate it multiple times but got nowhere, lol. Meta is even worse because accounts need to be 'personal'; if you have a Business Manager, the users added to it are all tied to their personal Me…

Meta and Google B2B are both horrible. Their ad account bans are constant, and they have no real escalation process to get help. These companies are monopolies that should treat businesses more seriously, especially in these situations.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#66
post #33

The interesting and yet-to-be-explained part is why google flagged the account? Put all the timestamps you want in the post mortem about what you observed, but you haven't addressed the root cause. The "this doesn't make sense" part of the story likely has a real explanation that nobody wants to reveal yet.

I don't think you're typically told why for these things, and it's mostly automated from what I can tell. The automated systems make mistakes but more importantly they're completely opaque. Nobody, not even Google, knows how they work exactly.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#68
post #33

The interesting and yet-to-be-explained part is why google flagged the account? Put all the timestamps you want in the post mortem about what you observed, but you haven't addressed the root cause. The "this doesn't make sense" part of the story likely has a real explanation that nobody wants to reveal yet.

Shouldn't Google answer this if they are unhappy with this incident report? Are we even sure that Railway knows?

They can't - that would violate the privacy rights of their customer.

They need to tell Railway and Railway needs to tell us, or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them.

Either way, we need to hear about this from Railway.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#69
post #12

I've been getting serious, recently, about moving all my workloads to equipment that I control in datacenters with which I have professional relationships. It's less expensive, easier, and this kind of nonsense doesn't happen. These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products. Footguns everywhere, pricing that is impossible to forecast or reason about, broken APIs, and autom…

It's really surprising how much cheaper colo becomes if you have an even vaguely predictable workload. And you don't have to be a major customer, either -- the data centers will happily sell you single U's or a couple U's, even on a monthly basis if you ask, making it perfectly viable for startups or advanced personal projects.

Re: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

#70
post #60
post #15

"Finally, we are in planning to remove Google Cloud services from our data plane’s hot path, and keeping them only for secondary/failover." That's pretty clear. Google can no longer be trusted as a B2B service provider.

Meta is no different. I know a company that had their OAuth app on Meta rendered completely unusable just because one of their employees (a dev) had their personal Facebook account banned by Meta for no reason. They tried to escalate it multiple times but got nowhere, lol. Meta is even worse because accounts need to be 'personal'; if you have a Business Manager, the users added to it are all tied to their personal Me…

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