Hi Railway team,

A custom domain on my backend service is stuck in VALIDATING_OWNERSHIP and the TLS certificate never issues, despite DNS being fully propagated and correct for over 2 hours.

Details

Project: brain-demo (ce688c27-1f4f-47a6-994c-07e9b5ea08e1)

Environment: production (9e040314-5bb7-4f3e-93ad-abb32d367589)

Service: backend (850b3f93-4bab-4467-b43e-a215861ce456)

Custom domain: api.counterbrain.com

Required CNAME target: 85z4bvk7.up.railway.app

What I've already verified (everything on my side is correct):

DNS is fully propagated: api.counterbrain.com → CNAME 85z4bvk7.up.railway.app → 69.46.46.59, confirmed on the authoritative nameserver (dns.technorail.com) and on public resolvers (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1).

Railway's own API reports the DNS record as PROPAGATED and currentValue == requiredValue == 85z4bvk7.up.railway.app.

The Railway edge already answers for the domain: http://api.counterbrain.com returns 301 → https, and http://api.counterbrain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/ returns 404 from Server: railway-edge (so the ACME path is served, not redirected to HTTPS).

No CAA record on counterbrain.com — Let's Encrypt is allowed to issue.

The app itself does not force any HTTPS redirect that could interfere with HTTP-01.

Likely cause

Earlier the DNS took ~65 minutes to propagate (slow registrar), so the initial validation attempts failed repeatedly. I then deleted and recreated the custom domain (which changed the CNAME target from 59w0qtgc to 85z4bvk7), updated DNS accordingly, and it propagated correctly — but the certificate has now been stuck in VALIDATING_OWNERSHIP for 2+ hours. I suspect a Let's Encrypt rate-limit / backoff triggered by the earlier failed attempts.

Request

Could you please force a re-validation / re-issue of the certificate for api.counterbrain.com, or clear whatever backoff state is blocking it? Everything on the DNS side is now correct and stable. I'd prefer not to delete+recreate again, since that reassigns the CNAME target and forces another DNS round-trip.

Thanks!