Platform-as-a-Service provider Railway experienced an eight-hour global outage on May 19, 2026, after Google Cloud abruptly suspended its account due to an automated sweep for suspicious activity.

Key Points

• The outage began at 10:20pm UTC and lasted until 6:14am, affecting all Railway workloads across multiple cloud providers.
• Google Cloud suspended the account as part of an automated security sweep targeting cryptocurrency mining and other abusive activities.
• Railway’s network control plane API was hosted exclusively on Google Cloud, causing a single point of failure for the entire platform.
• Customers experienced widespread service errors, including 503 and 404 codes, login failures, and dashboard access issues.
• Railway has committed to removing its sole dependency on Google Cloud to ensure future infrastructure resiliency and multi-cloud redundancy.

Why it Matters

This incident highlights the significant operational risks associated with relying on a single cloud provider for critical infrastructure components. It serves as a reminder for businesses to prioritize multi-cloud strategies to prevent automated security measures from causing total service disruptions.