The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation.
I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.
It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.
I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this.
In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.
If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.
Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.
Then they’re not doing their job OR Google has bad systems in place that make it so their account managers aren’t equipped to do their job. Neither is a good look!