They have not explained WHY their account was suspended. That's the most important part, imo. Cloud Providers don't suspend entire accounts for no reason.
Maybe I'm getting old but here[1] is a HN comment from 17 years ago complaining about Google banning accounts "by mistake" and having no recourse but to post on HN and hope Matt Cutts sees it and helps, and saying "there are literally 1000s of such stories for many years all over the blogoshphere and forums" which is something I remember from HN of years ago.
Which this company didn't. They managed 125b of assets belonging to other people, they didn't have 125b of their own.
They have 125b they can literally write a check against and allocate any way they want as long as it delivers an adequate return and doesn't piss off the shareholders. Other than sophistry, what's the difference?
No they don't. The pension regulator sets very restrictive controls on what they can do with that 125b, because it's neither the company's nor the shareholders' money.
> Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action. This action extended to many accounts within Google Cloud. As this was a platform-wide action, there was no proactive outreach to individual customers prior to the restriction.
This might be 100% of what google told them.
This is Google we're talking about. This absolutely happened many times in the past and will happen again.
If it were something out of Railways hands, I think they would say something like "We have not yet identified the reason for the suspension, and are awaiting a response from Google".
Generally it takes 30 days past due and complete no contact for anyone before suspension.
Then we got down to a very small number of major suppliers in some areas. Many have moats that deter switching. This gives the big suppliers too much power.
A century ago, this happened with railroads. Which is why railroads were forced to become common carriers. They're required to transport goods for anybody who can pay. Read up on antitrust activity of a century ago. We've been here before.
Oh...my. Just starting out in the industry, are we? Those of us who have been here for a while know reality is very different than newbie hopes and dreams. Once you've been burned for the n+1 time, that optimism will fade.