And this is Railway, a big enough name to top the HN main page and presumably find someone from Google to intervene at some point. I would have zero recourse if it was some little product that I built.
May 19, 22:10 UTC - Our automated monitoring detected API health check failures and paged our on-calls, who started investigating the issue. May 19, 22:11 UTC - Dashboard returning 503 errors. Users unable to log in. May 19, 22:19 UTC - Root cause identified: Google Cloud Platform has suspended Railway's production account. May 19, 22:22 UTC - P0 ticket filed with Google Cloud. Railway's GCP account manager engaged directly. May 19, 22:29 UTC - Incident declared. May 19, 22:29 UTC - GCP account access restored. All compute instances remained stopped and persistent disks inaccessible.
That's external dependency monitoring working exactly as it should. Most teams only monitor their own infrastructure. When a cloud provider, payment gateway, or third-party API fails — your own dashboards show green while users see failures.
The lesson isn't specific to GCP — it's that monitoring what you depend on but don't control is just as important as monitoring what you own.
They got TK to woo the enterprise customers who were forced to be hostage to OCI. But it seems they are still doing opposite of hostage here.