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.

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 Google. They let you use their services, but the moment you don't fit the norm, they suspend you.

They run a decent amount of their own compute/bare metal server for customer workloads. But likely still had some critical dependencies on GCP.

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 ?

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!

Yeah but until you find that the new cloud provider won't approve your compute quota or doesn't have enough capacity in the region or you hit fraud flags for stagnant account spinning up lots of compute.

I added the qs because it defaulted to a story from 3 months ago.

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.

Same applies to all the companies betting the farm on AWS.