Comment by sschueller
16 hours ago
It should be possible to sue Google for damages in such cases. This isnt a network outage or service failure which I would consider part of ToS.
16 hours ago
It should be possible to sue Google for damages in such cases. This isnt a network outage or service failure which I would consider part of ToS.
What if the reason for their stuff being shut down was a payment issue like an expired credit card or maxed credit account? Unless I missed it skim reading their post I don’t see any information anywhere about their communications with Google.
If you have an account manager and a contract, there's zero excuse for automated suspension. That's literally the whole point of having a dedicated person. From the report:
> May 19, 22:22 UTC - P0 ticket filed with Google Cloud. Railway's GCP account manager engaged directly.
It's always possible to sue, but Google has good terms of service and lawyers - I'm 99% confident that a lawsuit would end up nowhere.
They have every right to sue, and if they did sue they almost certainly would win. This is clear breach of contract. The only argument Google could make is "they did something to violate our agreement" but they'd have to prove that, and then have a damn good explanation for why they were in the right to suspend the account without any outreach. Unless Railway did something egregious, Google clearly made an error.
But that's not what will happen. Google will offer an apology (perhaps even a public one), a giant pile of account credit, and a pinky promise not to do it again. Railway will accept it and hmmm and haw internally about whether to decrease their reliance on GCP, and then when they calculate the cost of going in on other clouds more heavily (or their own metal), they'll just think harder about weird failure modes.
I'm sure their contract explicitly states that their account can be suspended or terminated immediately without prior notice upon violating some TOS. And, most TOS are incredibly wide and vague, it wouldn't necessarily be hard to find something they violated.
This is sort of the problem with these new-age internet companies. The contracts are incredibly hostile. Most TOS you see amount to "you have no rights and we can fuck you up the ass"
Google is a B2C company so I'm sure some of that culture transfers over to B2B relations, but I'm speculating. Maybe the contracts are more normal for B2B.
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One company I worked at is highly reliant on Google Cloud, but at one point we moved some services to Azure.
Azure noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of getting more of our business.
Google noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of keeping more of our business.
This is just a reminder that your multi-cloud strategy doesn't have to be 'deploy everything across multiple clouds'; it can even just be 'make it obvious that you have leverage'.
I can assure you that Google will be giving them significant commercial incentives as an apology for this behind the scene