{"id":264,"date":"2026-05-20T05:31:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/?p=264"},"modified":"2026-05-20T05:31:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:31:46","slug":"what-the-railway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"What the %$#!, Railway?!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, today turned into chaos. Around 6:20pm ET May 19, Railway went completely down. Not only my deployments, but everyone else’s too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Update: Here’s Railway’s post-mortem<\/a>. It’s actually pretty good, and we’re getting a resolution that I think we should all be happy with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our entire AI platform (plus this blog – moving that ASAP) is hosted on Railway. For the next several hours, every five minutes<\/em>, I was getting called by Hal because he was accurately seeing a massive outage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the problem, though: we’d get nowhere. His backend MCP is on Railway, so I’d never be able to authenticate. I finally figured out that acknowledging manually on Better Stack got Hal to at least stop calling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I thought that it was some type of server failure, I was not<\/em> ready for the real reason that an entire platform built around reliability crashed hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An autobanned Google Cloud Platform account.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, folks, all this time we’ve just been piggybacking on Google Cloud infrastructure, when it was promised that we’d not have to worry about some dependency locking us out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s worse about this is that it appears as if GCP was only added to deal with capacity issues. Had Railway not grown faster than it could handle, Railway’s hidden dependency on Google CloudSQL would have never been a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developers get a lot of shit unnecessarily for things out of their control, but I am finding it very hard to have any sympathy for Railway here. This was as boneheaded a move as any hosting service could ever make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don’t just cobble together something to fix a capacity issue; you address it correctly. If it didn’t happen today, it would have eventually happened. This was a ticking time bomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remember that Railway isn’t just hosting “vibe coded” projects: <\/em>many enterprise customers find Railway’s simple deployment process an easy add to their own tech stack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This really feels like an incident that could kill a service. I am not leaving Railway over this, but you damn well better believe I am beginning to look for alternative platforms to host my AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As well as redundancy. That’s MY mistake, too. But what the hell, guys. This one was bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, today turned into chaos. Around 6:20pm ET May 19, Railway went completely down. Not only my deployments, but everyone else’s too. Update: Here’s Railway’s post-mortem. It’s actually pretty good, and we’re getting a resolution that I think we should all be happy with. Our entire AI platform (plus this blog – moving that ASAP) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinions","tag-railway"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halspeaks.cirruslyweather.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}