IDK, it looks like servers were up, connectivity worked well, and some builds were failing. Wouldn't call that a big issue, and the same thing was happening with Vercel due to their git clones etc. yesterday too.
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.
Totally! People who see the impact will likely see more impacted than say, 3% of their services. Not all disruption created equal.
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!
> We rolled out a change to update our fraud model, and that uses workload fingerprinting
> 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.
Second complete outage on railway in 2 months for us (there was also a total outage on December 16th), and many issues with stuck builds and other minor issues in the months before that.
Looking to move. It's a bit of hassle to setup coolify and Hetzner but I have lost all trust.
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.
Joke about train line aside, I think Railway fits right in the spot that Heroku left.
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)?
Been building an open source version of railway at https://canine.sh. Offers all the same features without the potential of a vendor lock-in / price gouging.
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.
Yeah working through documentation still. The goal isn’t so much to replace coolify. Mostly born out of my last start up that ran a $20M business, 15 engineers, with about 300-1000qps at peak, with fairly complex query patterns.
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
VPS + Dokploy gives you just as much functionality with an additional performance boost. Hostinger has great prices and a one-click setup. Good for dozens of small projects.
+1 for dokploy, it's very flexible and allows me to setup my sites how I need. Especially as it concerns to the way I setup a static landing page, then /app goes to the react app. And /auth goes to a separate auth service, etc.
Render.com has a similar value proposition. I’ve used them and am pretty happy. Railway seems to have more bundled observability built in, that i’d like in render.
Yes, have you seen miget.com by any chance? You can start with the free tier, and can have a backend with a database for free (256Mi plan). If you need more, just upgrade. They redefined cloud billing. Worth checking.
This is great, not 10 minutes before this outage did I present Railway as a viable option for some small-scale hosting for prototypes and non-critical apps as an alternative to the Cloud giants
It always happens that way. I guarantee some people migrated from Heroku to Railway and bragged about future stability to the team, only to experience this.
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.
Oof, off topic but the trains were out of service here for my commute last night so I though from the headline this meant that somehow all trains everywhere just stopped working. Glad to see it’s just some Saas product that’s down
this is the hidden cost of the move to paas. you trade devops velocity for a massive single point of failure. once the global control plane goes down, your entire risk profile is basically out of your hands.
Affected by the outage since about 6:15 AM PT this morning. We're still down as of 9:00 AM PT.
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.
Possible empirical justification: Non-tech and more "typical" orgs (train companies...) don't spend lots of money on slick-sounding one-word .com domains.
Shell was originally very literal though. They sold seashells.
> 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 don't think "railway" at least conjures ideas about the company? It's not some random word. Not every company needs to be "helps you ship software quickly inc"
That's a big yikes just after promoting themselves in the Jmail thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966562
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)
IDK, it looks like servers were up, connectivity worked well, and some builds were failing. Wouldn't call that a big issue, and the same thing was happening with Vercel due to their git clones etc. yesterday too.
IOW, doesnt look as bad as the title suggests?
Hello! Railway founder here
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
Hi Jake. Appreciate your presence here on HN.
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.
Totally! People who see the impact will likely see more impacted than say, 3% of their services. Not all disruption created equal.
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!
> We rolled out a change to update our fraud model, and that uses workload fingerprinting
> 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.
Second complete outage on railway in 2 months for us (there was also a total outage on December 16th), and many issues with stuck builds and other minor issues in the months before that.
Looking to move. It's a bit of hassle to setup coolify and Hetzner but I have lost all trust.
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.
Joke about train line aside, I think Railway fits right in the spot that Heroku left.
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)?
Been building an open source version of railway at https://canine.sh. Offers all the same features without the potential of a vendor lock-in / price gouging.
The docs seem to be non existent. Is the canine yaml documented?
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.
Yeah working through documentation still. The goal isn’t so much to replace coolify. Mostly born out of my last start up that ran a $20M business, 15 engineers, with about 300-1000qps at peak, with fairly complex query patterns.
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
> Computing is getting cheaper
Heh.
Looks like a great product, although maybe mention some honest reasons to not use it, instead of the passive-aggressive marketing ones.
VPS + Dokploy gives you just as much functionality with an additional performance boost. Hostinger has great prices and a one-click setup. Good for dozens of small projects.
+1 for dokploy, it's very flexible and allows me to setup my sites how I need. Especially as it concerns to the way I setup a static landing page, then /app goes to the react app. And /auth goes to a separate auth service, etc.
Render.com has a similar value proposition. I’ve used them and am pretty happy. Railway seems to have more bundled observability built in, that i’d like in render.
Yes, have you seen miget.com by any chance? You can start with the free tier, and can have a backend with a database for free (256Mi plan). If you need more, just upgrade. They redefined cloud billing. Worth checking.
I use https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify on a VPS for this.
Context: This is Railway the PaaS company, not your daily commute vehicle (which is good in general, still bad for many users, like me).
A global train outage would be quite a spectacle, is that even possible?
Yeah, i probs should have made that clear
This is great, not 10 minutes before this outage did I present Railway as a viable option for some small-scale hosting for prototypes and non-critical apps as an alternative to the Cloud giants
It always happens that way. I guarantee some people migrated from Heroku to Railway and bragged about future stability to the team, only to experience this.
Yeah 100%
This won't change my decision, but it is still impeccable timing
Multiple services are receiving SIGTERM or shutdown signals. See dozens of support messages here: https://station.railway.com/questions/services-down-799f7bc1
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.
Oof, off topic but the trains were out of service here for my commute last night so I though from the headline this meant that somehow all trains everywhere just stopped working. Glad to see it’s just some Saas product that’s down
Indeed! Remote bricking of trains is perhaps a thing: https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-softw...
It's also mandated by Congress in the US, it's called PTC. (Remote control)
PaaS
I actually think the title is misleading. I'm not sure actual existing deployments are affected? Seemingly just new ones are not working?
Railway founder here. <3%.
That said, we treat this exigently seriously!
Any downtime is unacceptable and we'll have a post mortem up in the next couple hours
it seemed to have been all deployments that had a browser facing interface. id say some cloudflair DNS config messup
this is the hidden cost of the move to paas. you trade devops velocity for a massive single point of failure. once the global control plane goes down, your entire risk profile is basically out of your hands.
Does anyone know if Railway operates its own cloud or if it's running off AWS/GCP/Azure/etc...
They were originally a GCP wrapper but they started colo'ing their own racks about a year ago.
https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one
I think it has it's own "metal" services they're migrating customers to. Afaik they used GCP for "legacy" cloud services.
All of these services are bundling the underlying AWS/GCP/etc resources in an easier to use package.
This is actually not true for us at Railway. It's our own metal.
I thought this was about a global outage regarding actual trains, but it looks like Railway is a Heroku replacement.
Any news is good marketing if you're unknown.
lol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.
I've been using railway a while now, and I've basically never paid them but I would. It's even better than heroku. Super easy to use.
Their 5$ monthly has been far more than enough for me to host my demos.
Affected by the outage since about 6:15 AM PT this morning. We're still down as of 9:00 AM PT.
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.
Wasn't half the HN crowd repping this place yesterday when the Vercel CEO offered to pay for Jmail? Rough lol
Is anyone expected to know what railway.com is?
What is this 'railway'?
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.
dispell the hate from your heart
Questioning things is not 'hate' Mr Wolf.
> Does every tech company think they are Apple and have to register every word in the dictionary and redefine it as a technology company?
Netflix?
Possible empirical justification: Non-tech and more "typical" orgs (train companies...) don't spend lots of money on slick-sounding one-word .com domains.
could be worse
could be called "entire" (https://entire.io/)
Worse would be x.com.
A lot of companies have been doing that for a long time
Lotus
Jaguar
Caterpillar
Shell
its a human thing
Shell was originally very literal though. They sold seashells.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_plc
You don't think "railway" at least conjures ideas about the company? It's not some random word. Not every company needs to be "helps you ship software quickly inc"