Comment by scratchyone
1 day ago
Honestly still insane to nuke a high-volume client's business after a single payment issue. There would be no reason for Google to believe that a single hiccup like that is evidence that they won't get paid and have to cut account access immediately.
It's not a single payment failure, it would be multiple days, possibly even a week to 10days.
This is why businesses should put in the effort and sign up for credit terms. Then it's an invoice, and you reduce this risk substantially.
Credit cards are _not_ reliable at this scale. Banks are offline all the time, cards are marked stolen, protocols change, all sorts of things that will cause flags indicating "the money can't move down that path".
Businesses that pay for AWS/Cloud/etc via credit cards are trying to buy reliability but put it behind a single point of failure.
Credit cards are not how you should be paying for business services with uptime requirements!
It is insane, but my past experience with GCP is they suspended all service only days after a failed payment, after years of paying on time. It's a major factor in why I don't use them anymore. I'm not waking up to angry customers again because the CC is expired and I missed an email.
I'd be curious to know why Railway's account was suspended. Was it a similar payment issue or something else?
Railway might not be even in the realm of high-volume clients for Google. For all we know they might be efficient in utilizing Google infrastructure.
But most likely, it's just automations in place without an appropriate human override coupled with gross negligence.