Platform-as-a-Service provider Railway.com saw its Google Cloud account unexpectedly suspended earlier this week.

As per a report from The Register, the Railway claimed that the suspension was seemingly without a cause and led to a major outage for Railway.

The incident occurred late on May 19, with Railway's status page at the time noting that it was "investigating a widespread service disruption,” with customers experiencing a variety of issues.

Company solutions engineer Angelo Saraceno told The Register that the account was suspended by Google, which made its resources inaccessible. He said: "Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate ... we are livid and still trying to get the details."

The PaaS company has long experienced issues with Google Cloud, opting in 2024 to migrate some of its infrastructure into colocation data centers instead. The company has retained a control plane on Google Cloud, on which some databases rely, and the company spends eight figures on using the cloud platform annually.

By the early hours of May 20, things began to improve, with Railway writing, "More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.”

DCD has contacted Google for comment on the issue.

Update -

A person familiar with the situation has told DCD that a particular Railway project was correctly suspended after Google Cloud detected a spike in cryptocurrency mining, in violation of its terms of service.

The source added that multiple customer accounts were suspended, per its standard procedure, but Railway's account in particular has a multi-year history of failing to address abusive activity occurring on its platform.

Communications between Railway and Google Cloud were established fairly quickly, but no official support ticket was submitted. 

Original story resumes -

Cloud providers have been known to suspend accounts when the usage somehow violates their terms of use. For example, Microsoft terminated its contract with Israel's Unit 8200 after an investigation found it was using Microsoft's technology for mass surveillance of Palestinians.

The company also suspended access to cloud services for Russian companies in 2024 as part of an EU sanction package, and in July 2025, cut off India's Nayara Energy due to its relationship with Russia's Rosneft.

While in these cases, termination was intentional, accidental suspensions have also been known to happen. In 2024, Google accidentally deleted superannuation fund UniSuper's private cloud subscription, causing a week-long outage.