Google Cloud Abruptly Shuts Down Railway, Sparking Catastrophic Infrastructure Outage

On May 20, 2026 Railway experienced a catastrophic infrastructure outage after Google Cloud suspended the company's GCP account without prior warning, immediately disabling core services, administrative access, and build pipelines. Railway’s SREs regained account access within minutes and enacted emergency mitigations (throttling non-enterprise builds, recycling services), but persistent routing and boot failures required escalation to Google engineering and full recovery remained incomplete; the report frames the event as an operational/provider enforcement or automation failure rather than an attack, and calls for greater transparency from Google.