Railway (PaaS) global outage(status.railway.com) |
Railway (PaaS) global outage(status.railway.com) |
We'll have a post mortem for this one as we always write post mortems for anything that affects users
Our initial investigation reveals this affects <3% of instances
Apologies from myself + the Team. Any amount of downtime is completely unacceptable
You may monitor this incident here: https://status.railway.com/cmli5y9xt056zsdts5ngslbmp
This affected a seemingly random set of services across three of my accounts (pro and hobby, depending on if this is for work or just myself.) That ranges from Wordpress to static site hosting to a custom Python server. All of the deployments showed as Online, even after receiving a SIGTERM.
While 3% is 'good', that's an awfully wide range of things across multiple accounts for me, so it doesn't feel like 3% ;) Please publish the post mortem. I am a big fan of Railway but have really struggled with the amount of issues recently. You don't want to get Github's growing rep. Some people are already requesting I move one key service away, since this is not the first issue.
Finally, can I make a request re communication:
> If you are experiencing issues with your deployment, please attempt a re-deploy.
Why can't Railway restart or redeploy any affected service? This _sounds_ like you're requiring 3% of your users to manually fix the issue. I don't know if that's a communication problem or the actual solution, but I certainly had to do it manually, server by server.
We rolled out a change to update our fraud model, and that uses workload fingerprinting
Since, in all likelyhood, your projects are similarly structured, there will be more impacted workloads if the shape of your workloads was in the "false positive" set
Will have more information soon but very valid (and astute) feelings!
Since there hasn't been any responses on the official support forum, maybe this will help someone.
I did a backup of our deployment first and did a Restart (not a Redeploy). Our service came back up thankfully.
Obviously do your own safety check about persistent volumes and databases first.
Looking to move. It's a bit of hassle to setup coolify and Hetzner but I have lost all trust.
Of course every service will have outages, it's just funny to see it so soon after saying:
> We're nuts for studying failure at the company [...]
(albeit a different 'failure' context)
IOW, doesnt look as bad as the title suggests?
Our existing containers were in a failure state and are now are in a partial failure state. Containers are running, but underlying storage/database is offline.
Many questions on their forum are similar to our situation. People wondering if they should restart their containers to get things working again. Worried about if they should do anything, risk losing data if they do anything, or just give everything more time.
I'm glad Railway updated their status page, but more details need to be posted so everyone knows what to do now.
Everyone has outages, it's the way of life and technology. Communication with your customers always makes it less painful and people remember good communication and not the outage. Railway, let's start hearing more communication. Forum is having problems as well. Thanks.
Heard. Being transparent, usually the delay on ack is us trying to determine and correlate the issue. We have a post mortem going out but we note that first report was in our system 10 minutes before it was acked, to which the platform team was trying to see which layer the impact was at.
That said, this is maybe concern #1 of the support team. Where we want the delta between report and customer outage detected to be as small as possible. The way it usually works is that we have the platform alarms and pages go first, and then the platform engineer usually will page a support eng. to run communications.
Usually the priority is to have the platform engineer focus on triaging the issue and then offload the workload to our support team so that we can accurately state what is going on. We have a new comms clustering system that rolling out so that if we get 5 reports with the similar content, it pages up to the support team as well. (We will roll this out after we communicated with affected customers first.)
In situations like this, please dedicate at least one team member to respond as quickly as possible to the Railway Help Station posts. That's where your customers are going for communication and support.
They have a nice UI, support deploy any kind of backend-involved apps as long as it can be built into a docker container. While many PaaS out there seems to prioritize frontend only apps.
And they have a free plan, so people can just quickly deploy some POC before decide if it's good to move on.
Anyone know if there is any other PaaS that come with a low cost starter plan like this (a side from paying for a VPS)?
This won't change my decision, but it is still impeccable timing
Here's a sample log entry:
> 2026-02-11T14:35:11.916787622Z [err] 2026/02/11 14:35:03 [notice] 1#1: signal 15 (SIGTERM) received, exiting
I've had about one third of my Railway services affected. I had no notification from Railway, and logging in showed each affected service as 'Online', even though it had been shut down.
I'm pretty annoyed. I am hosting some key sites on Railway. This is not their first outage recently, and one time a couple of months ago was just as I was about to give our company owner a demo of the live product.
First off, super duper sorry. It's sometimes a good/bad thing if I can remember someones handle. ...and I specifically remember the support thread where we did have an outage before your demo :| - the number one goal for us is to deliver a great product. Number two is that we should never embarrass a user, outages do exactly that.
We just wrapped up the post mortem and that'll be published soon where it explains why the dashboard was reporting the state of the application incorrectly and would be more than happy to credit you for the impact to keep your business. That said, totally understand if two is way too much impact for your services.
I'm not an expert Railway user, but I have used it since close to the beginning and have thought of myself as a fan of the product. Sometimes it's the people who cheerlead who can be most annoyed when they're let down.
I'm grateful for the reply here, by you and by other Railway staff. Although a tad unhappy, I hope I've remained courteous and clear in all communication, here and in support forums, and I also want to commend you and other Railway staff on your communication. It's been clear and open. I replied to another person saying it was a good way to rebuild trust, and it is -- I have moved from the 'annoyed and looking for alternatives' stage to the 'maybe this can be moved past' stage. In your internal learnings re your retrospective / post-mortem, add something about public communication here as a positive thing, please. I do genuinely think you've all done a good job there.
Repeating “~3% impacted” three times? Damage control. Got wrecked. DB SIGTERM’d, app dead for hours, before they even posted a status update. 3% is 100% outage when it’s your stuff: broken dashboards and zero warning.
That said, we treat this exigently seriously!
Any downtime is unacceptable and we'll have a post mortem up in the next couple hours
I am assuming that a domain like railway.com should be about trains.
Why does every tech company have to name themselves as a one word .com website and what they do is unrelated and vague to their own name?
Does every tech company think they are Apple and have to register every word in the dictionary and redefine it as a technology company?
Really bad name for a company.
Netflix?
could be called "entire" (https://entire.io/)
Lotus
Jaguar
Caterpillar
Shell
its a human thing
> The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted, and his brother Samuel Samuel. Their father had owned an antique company in Houndsditch, London, which expanded in 1833 to import and sell seashells, after which the company "Shell" took its name.
You want docs like this:
https://coolify.io/docs/applications/ci-cd/github/setup-app
https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/dockerfile
https://coolify.io/docs/applications/build-packs/overview
Plenty of screenshots and exact step by step instructions. Throwing an "example git repo" with no documentation won't get you any users.
Put your shoes into that of a Heroku/Vercel user. DevOps is usually Somebody Else's Problem. They are not going to spend hours debugging kubernetes so if you want to sell them a PaaS built on Kubernetes, it has to be fool proof. Coolify is an excellent example, the underlying engineering is average at best (from a pure engineering point of view it's a very heavy app that suffers from frequent memory leaks, they have a new v5 rewrite but it's been stuck for 2 years) but the UI/UX has been polished very well.
Heh.
Looks like a great product, although maybe mention some honest reasons to not use it, instead of the passive-aggressive marketing ones.
I think the single VPS model is just too hard to get working right at that scale.
I think north flank / enterprise applications, would be a better comparison of what canine is trying to do, rather than coolify / indie hackers. The goal is not take away kubernetes, but to simplify it massively for 90% of use cases but still give full k8s api for any more advanced features
> Since, in all likelyhood, your projects are similarly structured...
Thanks for the info. For what it's worth and to inform your retrospective, this included:
* A Wordpress frontend, with just a few posts, minimal traffic -- but one that had been posted to LinkedIn yesterday
* A Docusaurus-generated static site. Completely static.
* A Python server where workload would show OpenAI API usage, with consistent behavioural patterns for at least two months (and, I am strongly skeptical would have different patterns to any hosted service that calls OpenAI.)
These all seem pretty different to me. Some that _are_ similarly structured (eg a second Python OpenAI-using server) were not killed.
Some things come to mind for your post-mortem:
* If 3% of your services were affected, does that match your expected fraud rate? That is an awful lot of customers to take down in one go, and you'd want to be very accurate in your modeling. I can't see how you'd plan to kill that many without false positives and negative media.
* I'm speaking only for myself but I cannot understand what these three services have in common, nor how at least 2/3 of them (Wordpress, static HTML) could seem anything other than completely normal.
* How or why were customers not notified? I have used services before where if something seemed dodgy they would proactively reach out and say 'tell us if it's legit or in 24 hours it will be shut down' or for something truly bad, eg massive CPU usage affecting other services, they'd kill it right away but would _tell you_. Invisible SIGTERMS to random containers we find out about the hard way seems the exact opposite of sensible handling of supposedly questionable clients.
So Railway (and other cloud providers) deal with fraud near constantly. The internet is a bad and scary place and we spend maybe a third to half of our total engineering cycles just on fraud/up-time related work. I don't wanna give any credit to script kiddies to the hostile nation states but we (and others) are under near and constant bombardment from crap workloads in the form of traffic, or not great CPU cycles, or sometimes more benignly, movie pirating.
Most cloud providers understandably don't like talking about it because ironically, the more they talk about it- the bad actors do indeed get a kick from seeing the chaos that they cause work. Begin the vicious cycle...
This hopefully answers:
> If 3% of your services were affected, does that match your expected fraud rate? That is an awful lot of customers to take down in one go, and you'd want to be very accurate in your modeling. I can't see how you'd plan to kill that many without false positives and negative media.
In our 5 year history, this is the third abuse related major outage. One being a Nation State DDoS, one being coordinated denial. This is the first one where it was a false positive taking down services automatically. We tune it constantly so its not really an issue except when it is.
So- with that background, we tune our boxes of lets say "performance" rules constantly. When we see bad workloads, or bad traffic, we have automated systems that "discourage" that use entirely.
When we updated those rules because we detected a new pattern, and then rolling it out, that's when we nailed the legit users, since this used the abuse pattern, it didn't show on your dash, hence the immediate gaslighting.
Which leads to the other question:
> How or why were customers not notified? I have used services before where if something seemed dodgy they would proactively reach out and say 'tell us if it's legit or in 24 hours it will be shut down' or for something truly bad, eg massive CPU usage affecting other services, they'd kill it right away but would _tell you_.
We don't want to tell fraudulent customers if they are effective or not. For this instance, it was a straight up logic bug on the heuristics match. But we have done this for our existence like black holing illegitimate traffic for example, then ban. We did this because some coordinated actors will deploy, get banned with: "reason" and then they would have backup accounts after they found that whatever they were doing was working. If you knew where to look, sometimes they will brag on their IRCs/Discords.
Candidly, we don't want to be transparent about this, but any user impact like this is the least we can do. Zooming out, macro wise, this is why Discord and other services are leaning towards ID verification. ...and it's hard for people on the non service provider side to appreciate the level of garbage out there in the internet. That said, that is an excuse- and we shovel that so that you can do your job and if we stop you, then thats on us which we own and hopefully do better about.
That said, you and others are understandably miffed (understatement) all we can do is work through our actions to rebuild trust.