The timestamp inconsistency teraflop points out is interesting — but the bigger takeaway for me is that Railway's own automated API health checks caught the failure at 22:10, a full 10 minutes before the root cause was identified.

That's external dependency monitoring working exactly as it should. Most teams only monitor their own infrastructure. When a cloud provider, payment gateway, or third-party API fails — your own dashboards show green while users see failures.

The lesson isn't specific to GCP — it's that monitoring what you depend on but don't control is just as important as monitoring what you own.