May 2024 UniSuper incident: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...

A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

8 May 2024

UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.

While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.

Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events, where an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.

This is described as an isolated, “one-of-a-kind occurrence” that has never before occurred with any Google Cloud client globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the sequence of events and taken measures to ensure it does not happen again.

Why did the outage last so long?

UniSuper had duplication across two geographies as protection against outages and data loss. However, the deletion of the Private Cloud subscription triggered deletion across both geographies.

Restoring the Private Cloud required significant coordination and effort between UniSuper and Google Cloud, including recovery of hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications.

• dantiberian

  today at 4:20 AM

  I wrote about the UniSuper issue at the time: https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper. It was a pretty nasty bug where their VMWare environment was created with a one-year expiry date, but was one "resource" from the perspective of Google Cloud.

• kvakvs

  today at 3:50 AM

  The instant cascading worldwide deletion upon closing or deleting a subscription sounds like a recipe for disaster. Why not mark it for deletion and delete say... a day or a week later?

  • shye

    today at 3:57 AM

    From personal experience, as a customer who once did something stupid: Google Cloud does soft deletes. But you need to reach out to support fast enough. And really, if you deleted something important and discovered it only the next day, and not within minutes, you're having a bigger issue that a soft delete won't solve.

  • manapause

    today at 4:01 AM

    It’s a good question. That said unless there are compliance or fallback concerns i would prefer a service that burns my data on departure.

  • modernpacifist

    today at 3:56 AM

    Either mark-for-delete has the same impact as deleting in terms of shooting all the Cloud resources associated with the subscription, at which point the outage still happens but maybe the recovery is smoother or you've just delayed the inevitable by a week because no one will look at it unless there is actual impact.

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.

• somewhatgoated

  today at 2:17 AM

  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.

  • adamtaylor_13

    today at 3:21 AM

    Perhaps you don't notice GCP outages because so few companies rely on them?

    • fragmede

      today at 3:42 AM

      GCP has a lot of customers. But you wouldn't know the companies that do, unless you worked there and wanted to leak it, or it publicly comes out. Eg it's been publicly acknowledged that Apple uses GCP for iCloud, https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-g... , and Home Depot is another that's used as a case study, https://cloud.google.com/customers/the-home-depot but most customers don't want to make a big deal about being on GCP as it's none of our business who's hosting them.

      • shye

        today at 3:59 AM

        Apple also uses AWS, and I won't be surprised if they also use Azure. Big companies are multicloud, and not because it's a good idea (it rarely is), but because they inherited multiple environments on different CSPs, and maintaining those where they are is often cheaper than migrating them to a different CSP.

        • Alive-in-2025

          today at 4:24 AM

          I wonder if big companies can get a special contract with something like you can't delete my service automatically (unless it's an emergency)

      • Imustaskforhelp

        today at 4:03 AM

        upvoted & favourited because you taught me a really interesting fact which I feel makes up for an amazing discussion (regarding icloud using GCP).

        also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)

        I haven't read the articles and I admit that but can you please elaborate to me on why Apple uses GCP themselves for idrive, I would love to know the technical decisions behind it on a genuinely curious level.

        From my (let's face it) limited understanding of GCP, it isn't particularly good or price performant and one of the wonders is that Google sells it directly with Google photos too and an competitive lineup at android.

        So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?

        I mean, I can still try to understand the google search pays apple 10 billion dollars (right?) deal but I don't quite understand why apple would pick GCP when the hosting market is one of the more competitive ones with lots of companies.

        I would love to get some explainations or theories as to why exactly is that the case

        (Also given its HN, if anyone from apple is reading or knows the answer, I would love that too!)

  • abofh

    today at 2:56 AM

    I've been in AWS for almost twenty years at this point. It's been a long time since I've seen a global outage of the data plane on anything. The control plane, especially the US-east-1 services? Yes - but if you're off of east-1, your outages are measured in missile strikes, not botched deployments.

    • andreareina

      today at 3:35 AM

      Didn't the latest outage affect people not on us-east-1 because internal aws services depend on us-east-1?

      • happymellon

        today at 4:36 AM

        Work for a major bank who isn't solely in US East 1.

        No it didn't impact us.

      • erikerikson

        today at 3:46 AM

        The impacts are usually partial. For example, scaling is impacted but everything already deployed contributes to work up to capacity. Or, you can't change configuration but the previous configuration works as configured. Often surprisingly not so impactful even if there can be limited work stoppage.

        • hasyimibhar

          today at 4:00 AM

          The problem with the us-east-1 outage is that a lot of big companies are there, so even if you try your best not to depend on us-east-1, your third party providers are most likely there. In my previous company, we were completely down during us-east-1 outage because of other dependencies that are beyond our control.

          • erikerikson

            today at 4:12 AM

            Entirely fair. I have thus far avoided that problem. Not always engineering's choice.

  • plandis

    today at 2:51 AM

    GCP has had outages. From a quick search it looks like they had a global outage less than a year ago:

    https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

  • pixl97

    today at 2:49 AM

    GCP never goes down because they banned all their customers.

  • JoRyGu

    today at 2:32 AM

    AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time (as long as they aren't down because Iran blew up their data center). That's obviously REALLY bad for certain industries, but I suspect for the vast majority of their customers it's not a big deal. We've been able to isolate the damage almost every time just by having AZ failover in place and avoiding us-east-1 where we can.

  • corpoposter

    today at 2:31 AM

    IIRC the Paris datacenter flood took down a whole “region” and some data was permanently unrecoverable.

  • nemothekid

    today at 3:28 AM

    >On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP

    They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.

  • blobbers

    today at 3:07 AM

    Unfortunately, if everyone goes down people are understanding. If just _you_ go down, then its oddly less forgiveable.

  • manyatoms

    today at 3:23 AM

    How is blackhole-ing a customer not considered an outage?

  • devmor

    today at 2:51 AM

    There was a pretty bad one last summer - their IAM system got a bad update and it broke almost all GCP services for an hour or so, since every authenticated API call reaches out to IAM.

    It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.

  • danesparza

    today at 3:13 AM

    You can read the parent post, right?

  • Izikiel43

    today at 3:17 AM

    I still remember the one where they nuked all the storage of I think an Australian insurance company I think, luckily the it department had done a multi cloud setup for backups

• Spooky23

  today at 3:42 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

  Azure nerfed the front door of all Azure and O365 services last year.

  All of these companies are great at what they did, and occasionally fuck up.

• overfeed

  today at 2:35 AM

  > Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.

  AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.

  • stingraycharles

    today at 2:39 AM

    That’s an entirely different type of problem, and avoidable by just using us-east-2 (I still don’t understand why people default to us-east-1 unless they require some highly specific services).

    • aloha2436

      today at 3:16 AM

      Is it that easily avoidable? A lot of AWS's control plane seems to have dependencies on us-east-1, or at least that's what it's looked like as a non-us-east-1 user during recent outages.

    • MattGaiser

      today at 3:15 AM

      Sympathy. Railway is going to have numerous people blaming them for this outage. When us-east-1 fails, it is headline news, so you are not to blame.

  • yandie

    today at 3:47 AM

    During my 5 years of my startup, we had only 1 outage due to AWS because we picked us-west-2 as the primary reason. If anyone starting a company and picks us-east-1 as the primary reason, they should be fired. There's absolutely no reason to be in that region.

    • tempest_

      today at 3:53 AM

      Why do people want to be in that region? Is it the default or something?

      I know some workloads help to be colocated but all these places are connected by fiber and every cloud has a worldwide CDN it seems.

  • xavdid

    today at 3:53 AM

    If my cloud provider brings my startup down, it's my problem. If they bring all the startups down, that's their problem.

  • mgfist

    today at 3:24 AM

    And we all celebrate it since we can't do any work

• rozap

  today at 2:31 AM

  Yep, we also don't touch them for this same reason.

• abrookewood

  today at 1:50 AM

  Yep, agree 100%. Such a stupid move on their behalf.

• jameson

  today at 2:00 AM

  What was the reason GCP took down a startup previously?

  • __s

    today at 2:28 AM

    hn.algolia.com gcp blocked

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33360416

    Then I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577

  • today at 2:14 AM

• busterarm

  today at 3:11 AM

  Hetzner and OVH also do this all the time.

  It's AWS and Azure that are the outliers and tend not to care too much what their customers do with their infrastructure. AWS is perfectly fine with allowing me to run copies of 15 year old vulnerable AMIs copied from AMIs they've long since deprecated and removed. Even for removed features like NAT AMIs.

• tjpnz

  today at 1:35 AM

  AWS normally contacts you first.

  • kevin_nisbet

    today at 1:55 AM

    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.

    • dannyw

      today at 2:27 AM

      You should not be conducting unauthorized penetration tests against third party infrastructure providers without permission. They have processes and systems and usually just wants a heads up of what you plan to test and t the duration / timestamps.

      Cuz otherwise you look like a threat actor.

      That’s assuming your vendor was pentesting AWS systems. If you meant you hired a vendor to pentest your own systems on AWS, that’s of course a totally different matter.

      • kevin_nisbet

        today at 2:38 AM

        >That’s assuming your vendor was pentesting AWS systems. If you meant you hired a vendor to pentest your own systems on AWS, that’s of course a totally different matter.

        Sorry for being unclear, the vendor was attacking our organization only, and any other company was expressly forbidden in the contract. As I recall it was a fake SSO sign-in page to collect credentials that they would try and social engineer our employees with.

        • Shank

          today at 3:56 AM

          At a minimum you should contact AWS before you launch a phishing page as a test that targets AWS customers.

    • alchemism

      today at 1:58 AM

      I’m fairly certain you are supposed to contact any vendor before attempting to penetrate hosts with authorization, not the other way around.

      • coredog64

        today at 2:26 AM

        Having done this for both Azure and AWS, there's a specific ticket that needs to be filed with each provider that documents the scope of your pen test, where you're coming from, and a time frame over which you're doing it (which ISTR was "not more than 24 hours")

    • mixdup

      today at 2:18 AM

      Responding to an unknown security tester like that is a selling point, not a cautionary tale

      • kevin_nisbet

        today at 2:44 AM

        Yup, I thought it was great. Although one concern I always had in the back of my mind was where is the line drawn. Such as if an adversary gains access to one of my orgs accounts and does something similar, do we get 100% taken out.

    • today at 2:53 AM

  • cherioo

    today at 1:43 AM

    They better do. What is google doing?

    • Gigachad

      today at 1:51 AM

      It's all AI powered

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?

• garciasn

  today at 2:06 AM

  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.

  • throwaway041207

    today at 4:31 AM

    This is actually kind of validating. I work for a company that spends almost 1mm a year on GCP. We've never had an actual support contract with them because the numbers work out to, at a minimum, being 10% of our spend. We've yet to encounter a situation where we actually needed GCP support, so we've held off. In the moments where we'd like to get some support (mostly around datastore behavior) we've managed to work around it or figure it out ourselves. So it's good to know we haven't missed out on much. Beyond the offensive aspect of GCP offering no support if we aren't willing to cough up a non-trivial percentage of our spend, I'm pretty happy with it.

  • OptionOfT

    today at 2:16 AM

    It's because they're measured on something, unsure which metric, but it's definitely not how helpful they are to you.

    • YuriNiyazov

      today at 2:21 AM

      Don't know about GCP, but our AE on AWS was also continuously rotating, and as best I can tell, their job was to figure out what we are planning to build, and to ensure that we should always use <INSERT AWS SERVICE DU JOUR> for that, rather than a competitor product or build it ourselves.

      • Rodeoclash

        today at 2:25 AM

        Exactly the same experience for us as well. I just don't bother with them.

        • garciasn

          today at 2:40 AM

          Before I just cut them off entirely, I used to tell them my primary concern was cost savings and that I wanted them to recommend ways I could cut 25% off my bill every month and watch the glorified salespeople fumble over trying to avoid that conversation.

          It’s ok though, Claude helped us cut >45% of our monthly costs. I’m surprised they haven’t been beating down my door after we made that level-shift. Probably in AE transition. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • shye

    today at 4:03 AM

    That's exactly why I'm less pleased with GCP: to trust a CSP (or any service), I need to be assured that when (not if) things go wrong, I could escalate to a team that would have my back.

  • dylanpyle

    today at 3:09 AM

    For what it's worth - I'm not sure what the criteria is (I assume we're "medium sized / not a big upsell opportunity"?) - our GCP rep quickly pushed us to switching to using a GCP reseller. They took over our billing so that we can pay via ACH, and provide both free first-line support/escalation and paid engagements for bigger projects; they don't charge a premium on top, apparently Google pays them for supporting us. Hasn't made much of a difference in how we operate, but at least we have a direct-ish line for issues when they come up.

  • idontwantthis

    today at 2:19 AM

    It doesn’t worry you enough that someday you could have a serious problem and they wouldn’t be able to help you?

    • garciasn

      today at 2:22 AM

      On the list of things that worry me the most about our company's stuff, an issue I cannot solve w/o help from a human at GCP is around #900000042.

• ndneighbor

  today at 2:48 AM

  huh- I guess there are two HN submissions with meaningful replies...

  I said this in the other thread, we got access to our account back, but even with a Account Rep. and a CSM on our account- it still took them a while to figure out what was going on.

  I'm sure it could have been worse if we didn't have a rep on our account.

• guluarte

  today at 2:09 AM

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

  • rajeshvar

    today at 3:38 AM

    What does blocked mean? Is there a different post that I am missing? There is shared infrastructure in GCP for networking (ex-googler here) and if only railway is affected, then it is not clear if it is only GCP or if there is something from Railway's perspective that needs to be addressed.

Lesson learned: don't rely on a single hyperscaler, even (or especially) as a startup.

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.

• nikcub

  today at 3:23 AM

  This is the conflict at the center of running a hosting company - make it easy to signup and you get a lot of new users but also a lot of abuse.

  Implement anti-abuse measures and you will hit some loud false positives (this may be the case with GCP here).

  I don't envy anybody running a hosting co - the internet is a really ugly place under the surface.

  edit: to add - AWS are really good here. Must be the ~30 years of retail fraud and abuse experience.

I thought Railway was building their own data centers? [0]

> The fact of the matter is, you simply cannot build a cloud on someone else’s cloud.

Indeed…

[0] https://blog.railway.com/p/launch-week-02-welcome

• QuinnyPig

  today at 4:38 AM

  Vercel seems to be pulling it off. So does PlanetScale, albeit for databases only. But everything’s a database.

Cloud platform dependencies are becoming a huge single point of failure

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.

All in on cloud so we don’t need to worry about backups. Now your subscription is the single point of failure.

Well, as a 2 week tenured and very happy Railway customer until now, I am now a Render customer. Somehow DNS cut over within 1 min(!) and live after about 30 minutes of work. Not bad!

• DrewADesign

  today at 2:35 AM

  In my experience, DNS changes are a lot faster than they used to be. There’s some website that has a map that tries to resolve your domain with a bunch of name servers around the world that was pretty neat to look at last time I migrated something.

  • nbarbettini

    today at 3:47 AM

    I became so conditioned to waiting hours(!) for DNS propagation that I'm always pleasantly surprised when it takes <5 min these days.

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?

• lateral_cloud

  today at 4:29 AM

  Keep the pitchforks at bay for now. No one knows what actually happened yet and we are only seeing one side of this outage.

• BarryMilo

  today at 2:32 AM

  Surely this is automated. They wouldn't waste precious dollars on employing humans just to keep other humans happy.

  • snypher

    today at 4:39 AM

    It surprises me there's not a manual review for $$$$ accounts. Speculation at this stage, but it's weird they would be put in the Recycle Bin like that.

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.

• cube00

  today at 4:34 AM

  > Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.

  Not sure too many VCs would be cool with deep redundancy when there's more features to build to bring in more customers instead.

• choilive

  today at 1:37 AM

  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.

• jpollock

  today at 2:07 AM

  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!

  • mbreese

    today at 2:20 AM

    Yeah, I'm not sure what to think here. We know Google is not the best at customer service and has automated account suspensions. But, what I'm curious about here is why this happened.

    Railway hosts applications for customers. An uneducated guess for some possible reasons: 1) one of those customers hosted something they shouldn't have 2) railway had something spawn that took up too many resources 3) Or their account balance was too high 4) Or something...

    But all of this probably culminates in someone needed to read an email that was missed.

    Scaling a customer infrastructure setup like Railway is hard. This is one of the non-technical hard parts - how to make sure your account with your primary vendor is safe. But, I'm willing to wait to pass judgement here until more information is available. I'm sure the post-mortem will have lessons. I'd like to know more.

  • thayne

    today at 3:38 AM

    > via their contact method, aka the email they set it up with

    If it's anything like AWS, that may be just one of hundreds of emails they send every day, most of which are just noise.

  • scratchyone

    today at 2:15 AM

    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.

• today at 2:23 AM

The 3-2-1 backup rule is pretty outdated in the world of cloud. You could have 3 complete copies of your data in different S3 buckets, but if they're all under the same account you've lost your blast radius protection

• whalesalad

  today at 4:30 AM

  You replicate data to different clouds.

• rsync

  today at 3:02 AM

  If only there were a quick and easy way to replicate s3 buckets to an independent provider…

  … on the Unix command line …

  … to a cloud older than AWS…

  … if only …

  • lemagedurage

    today at 4:33 AM

    Inflated egress costs might make this prohibitively expensive, $80 per TB at GCP and AWS

  • funtech

    today at 3:20 AM

    Wish I could upvote this comment account more. Too many people look for something new and shiny when trusty ol tools are sitting right there. :)

  • oefrha

    today at 3:18 AM

    Well having backups help, but I certainly can’t migrate my infra to rsync.net on moments’ notice (or ever since rsync.net does storage and nothing else) so my customers aren’t affected.

  • eclipticplane

    today at 3:18 AM

    I don't think that technology exists. Sorry.

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?

• xyzzy_plugh

  today at 2:02 AM

  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.

• Avicebron

  today at 1:52 AM

  > 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?

• throwaway85825

  today at 1:54 AM

  Even if you are a billion dollar company you still have problems like the Australian pension did. Google is just that bad.

• chi_features

  today at 2:03 AM

  https://blog.railway.com/p/series-b

  Agreed. Railway are probably not far off a billion dollar company though!

• jrockway

  today at 2:44 AM

  I don't think you can ever trust one service with critical data. Some Claude instance deletes your prod database, you have to restore from an offsite backup because it also deleted your local backups. Even at small startups we did pg_dump to AWS from GCP because ... who knows what is going to happen to GCP, and we want to continue to be in business if that happens.

  I don't feel safe with any one single point of failure. "Your credit card bounced", "you thought it was dev", "you got hacked", etc. are all the same problem to me and no cloud provider solves those merely by setting up an account.

• ttoinou

  today at 2:02 AM

  Railway isnt far from being a billion dollar company, no ?

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.

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.

• oofbey

  today at 3:01 AM

  After reading about how their delete database API also deletes all the backups, I concluded they are not to be trusted.

• marknutter

  today at 3:35 AM

  It's not back.

I didn’t knew Railway so with this misleading headline I thought a Google Cloud data centre was being built in the way of a railroad. That’d been a funny story to read..

• astafrig

  today at 3:02 AM

  How is the title misleading?

Wild to me that any tech sector business would want to rent an operating environment to park their entire infrastructure into. This is the equivalent to traveling shoe salesmen setting up a tent in the parking lot of a strip mall.

Building a startup on GCP (or even Google Workspace) is an existential risk.

From their founder on X...

"Absolutely. The Railway network is a mesh ring between AWS, GCP, and Metal

So: - High availability interconnects - High availability path routing between clouds - Database itself is high availability

However, Google's VPC itself is not. So we will add a shard to Metal and AWS"

• hnburnsy

  today at 2:51 AM

  More here...

  https://x.com/JustJake

Let's blame some rouge AI agent at GCP causing this.

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.

Dupe - join the discussion started an hour ago instead of query string work (12 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827

• aarondf

  today at 12:25 AM

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

“Deletion of private cloud subscription…”

Who deleted it?

Huh.

Railway dot com

Has nothing to do with railways.

I wish software people would get their own words.

There's a lot of, what seems to me, unfounded blame being directed at Google for this. Isn't railway the company that just blamed Anthropic for deleting their prod database?

• mmmore

  today at 2:31 AM

  Nope, Railway was the company who was hosting PocketOS, which is the company that blamed Cursor for deleting their prod database. Railway is only involved insofar as their API allowed an instant delete of the prod database.

  • oofbey

    today at 3:02 AM

    Railway deserves a lot of blame here. Deleting backups along with the database is a lot like not having backups. Moronic design choice.

    • Genego

      today at 3:32 AM

      Why does Railway deserve any blame here at all? It was an MCP with elevated infra access, that the user willingly connected through Cursor, which allowed an LLM Agent to manage infra on Railway. The user would first have gone through oAuth confirming the access level scope (I would have rejected the moment it indicates to me that it can delete critical infra and backups...). So obviously it has access to all commands the user would also have access to. From my perspective the blame is entirely on the user, and partly on Cursor for not enforcing HITL correctly across their agents.

      • wmf

        today at 3:46 AM

        Putting AI aside, people make mistakes. One of the most common mistakes people make is deleting the wrong thing. After they realize the mistake, people want to restore the thing they deleted from backups. Thus deleting the thing and deleting the backups of the thing should always be separate operations.

        • utunga

          today at 4:26 AM

          Absolutely.

• sidrag22

  today at 2:35 AM

  fairly certain you are remembering the goofy article that was going around where a railway user allowed an agent to delete his db. iirc he questioned the agent after and the agent told him it should have read the file that told him not to do things, so just sounds like he deleted his db and blamed his tools.

If you buy a cloud-on-a-cloud, you're a clown-on-a-clown.

Do not become dependent on Google. Ever.

• cindyllm

  today at 4:01 AM

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one of the many reasons companies are cloud agnostic and dont want to get locked in

• fh67

  today at 2:24 AM

  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.

github got way more noise for less

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200827

wish I knew what "railway" is

Let me guess… Googler running AI agent in production that blocked this startup’s account.

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TL;DR: putting all your eggs into one basket is bad, man.

• canpan

  today at 1:26 AM

  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.

  • FlamingMoe

    today at 1:33 AM

    What do you mean by local small provider? A registrar on main street?

  • truekonrads

    today at 1:35 AM

    MarkMonitor

    • Barbing

      today at 1:58 AM

      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

        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.
      

      -

      Edit-Private equity apparently https://px3partners.com

        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.

• binarycleric

  today at 2:01 AM

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