Routing issues across Railway from Korea
hwasub
PROOP

17 days ago

Routing issues across Railway apps and railway.com from Korea: LAX/SIN instead of Tokyo

I’m trying to use Railway for users in South Korea with consistently low latency, but performance deteriorated enough that I canceled my Pro subscription. I recently returned to investigate and found Korean connections entering through Los Angeles or Singapore instead of the Tokyo ingress I had previously observed. This is not limited to one application: I also tried multiple Railway applications and railway.com itself and observed routing problems, although the detailed measurements below cover one representative application. The issue was present in my latest tests on September 25, 2026; please investigate routing across the affected Korean networks and whether Tokyo ingress or comparably low-latency routing can be restored.

Scope and representative resource

  • Representative application: https://app-production-25776.up.railway.app/
  • Reported upstream zone: railway/asia-southeast1-eqsg3a
  • Destination IPv4: 69.46.46.86 in every recorded test below
  • Observation window: September 25, 2026, 02:19:39–02:25:10 UTC (11:19:39–11:25:10 KST)
  • All recorded requests returned HTTP 200. No failed deployment was identified.
  • Exact onset and timestamped last-known-good result: unknown.

Based on my additional tests across multiple apps and railway.com, please investigate this as a potentially broader routing issue rather than limiting the investigation to a service’s configuration.

Recorded measurements

Requests were made directly to the Railway-provided hostname using IPv4 and X-Railway-Debug: 1. Times are cumulative from the start of each curl request. Timestamps come from HTTP response Date headers.

| Source | UTC time | Edge | TCP connected | TLS complete | TTFB |

|---|---|---|---:|---:|---:|

| KT fixed-line, Korea | 02:19:39 | lax1 | 144.6 ms | 296.1 ms | 616.4 ms |

| SKB fixed-line, Korea | 02:20:15 | sin1 | 151.2 ms | 282.0 ms | 405.6 ms |

| SKT 5G, Korea | 02:21:45 | sin1 | 149.1 ms | 299.6 ms | 426.5 ms |

| LG U+ 4G, Korea | 02:22:54 | sin1 | 139.5 ms | 276.0 ms | 447.8 ms |

| (informational) Latitude.sh Tokyo datacenter | 02:25:10 | hnd1 | 83.5 ms | 131.9 ms | 210.8 ms |

Relevant response headers:

Korea Telecom fixed-line — 2026-09-25 02:19:39 UTC
x-railway-request-id: nK6QlX-xTZC37pelAXC71g
x-railway-edge: lax1
x-hikari-trace: lax1.z1hw,lax1.v9kt,sin1.nzn2

SK Broadband fixed-line — 2026-09-25 02:20:15 UTC
x-railway-request-id: vw78llW0R86DQmqgoB_USg
x-railway-edge: sin1
x-hikari-trace: sin1.tr00

SK Telecom 5G — 2026-09-25 02:21:45 UTC
x-railway-request-id: haCYGu0URa6Ka_qoJH0Vcg
x-railway-edge: sin1
x-hikari-trace: sin1.tr00

LG Uplus 4G — 2026-09-25 02:22:54 UTC
x-railway-request-id: eagO17jZT4-K1rsxacI7Nw
x-railway-edge: sin1
x-hikari-trace: sin1.hs0s,sin1.tr00

Latitude.sh Tokyo — 2026-09-25 02:25:10 UTC
x-railway-request-id: mbgvxY28RU-MbTtEV7rehQ
x-railway-edge: hnd1
x-hikari-trace: hnd1.df23,hnd1.2zrd

All five responses reported server: railway-hikari and x-railway-upstream-zone: railway/asia-southeast1-eqsg3a.

Reproduction and uncertainty

Run from an affected Korean connection:

curl -4 -sS -D - -o /dev/null -H 'X-Railway-Debug: 1' -w '\nIP=%{remote_ip} connect=%{time_connect}s TLS=%{time_appconnect}s TTFB=%{time_starttransfer}s\n' https://<omain-name>.up.railway.app/

KT’s trace shows LAX ingress followed by SIN. The Tokyo test reaches hnd1 at the same destination IP, demonstrating that Tokyo ingress is available from at least that network.

Singapore ingress is also a concern: the three Korean SIN samples took 406–448 ms to first byte. I understand that the origin is in Singapore; my question is why Korean connections no longer terminate at Tokyo before forwarding to the origin.

These are individual samples, not controlled benchmarks. They do not establish the cause, isolate application processing time, or prove how much Tokyo ingress would improve Korean latency. My observations across other apps and railway.com suggest broader scope but do not establish a shared underlying cause. No traceroute/MTR results or configuration fixes are included.

Requested investigation and referral

The AI assistant first recommended contacting Railway support because the observed routing degradation warranted network investigation and similar routing reports had previously been addressed by Railway. The concrete blocker is that client measurements do not reveal why ingress selection changed.

Please investigate routing for these Korean networks, including any relevant BGP, prefix, peering, or transit changes. Please assess both KT’s LAX detour and the other networks’ SIN ingress; moving KT to Singapore alone would not address the full concern. The named application should serve as a diagnostic reference for this broader investigation.

Prepared with Railway's support template (v1).

Solved

5 Replies

Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • 17 days ago


sam-a
EMPLOYEE

17 days ago

Your measurements show KT entering through Los Angeles and the other tested Korean networks entering Singapore, while Tokyo ingress remains reachable from your Tokyo test. They don’t yet explain why those routes are selected or whether Tokyo would improve latency from Korea.

Could you share a network diagnostic report from KT and, if possible, one of the Korean connections reaching Singapore? That would add the network-path information missing from the curl results and help investigate both routing patterns.


Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • 17 days ago


sam-a

Your measurements show KT entering through Los Angeles and the other tested Korean networks entering Singapore, while Tokyo ingress remains reachable from your Tokyo test. They don’t yet explain why those routes are selected or whether Tokyo would improve latency from Korea. Could you share a [network diagnostic report](https://docs.railway.com/networking/troubleshooting/network-diagnostics) from KT and, if possible, one of the Korean connections reaching Singapore? That would add the network-path information missing from the curl results and help investigate both routing patterns.

hwasub
PROOP

17 days ago

Thanks for your response. I’ve attached diagnostic reports from KT, SK Broadband, SK Telecom, and LG U+.

Notably, LG U+ reached the Tokyo edge (hnd1) from South Korea when testing the diagnostic endpoint, while KT reached Los Angeles and SKB/SKT reached Singapore. LG U+ had the lowest average latency, although the difference was modest compared with SK Broadband’s Singapore route.

Please review the attached reports and help improve routing for the affected Korean networks, particularly KT’s detour through Los Angeles. Thank you.


Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • 17 days ago


sam-a
EMPLOYEE

16 days ago

Thanks for sending all four reports. They confirm KT reaching Los Angeles, SK Broadband and SK Telecom reaching Singapore, and LG U+ reaching Tokyo from Korea. I’ll pass these to our network team to investigate KT’s Los Angeles detour and whether routing can be improved for the SK networks too. You don’t need to collect anything else for now.


Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • 16 days ago


chandrika
EMPLOYEE

2 days ago

Thank you for your patience on this, and for the diagnostic reports, they made it easy to pin down!

We asked one of our upstream providers to stop sending KT traffic through Los Angeles. Testing from KT today, requests now enter at our Tokyo edge, with TCP connect around 33-68 ms, down from ~145 ms through lax1.

SK Broadband and SK Telecom still enter at Singapore (sin1). Since your app runs in Singapore, that's the edge closest to your origin, so going through Tokyo would add a Tokyo to Singapore leg rather than save time. We're leaving those as they are.

Could you re-run your curl from KT when you get a chance and let us know if you still see lax1 or high latency?


chandrika

Thank you for your patience on this, and for the diagnostic reports, they made it easy to pin down! We asked one of our upstream providers to stop sending KT traffic through Los Angeles. Testing from KT today, requests now enter at our Tokyo edge, with TCP connect around 33-68 ms, down from ~145 ms through lax1. SK Broadband and SK Telecom still enter at Singapore (sin1). Since your app runs in Singapore, that's the edge closest to your origin, so going through Tokyo would add a Tokyo to Singapore leg rather than save time. We're leaving those as they are. Could you re-run your curl from KT when you get a chance and let us know if you still see lax1 or high latency?

hwasub
PROOP

2 days ago

I've consistently seen routing through hnd1 PoP across multiple KT connections over the past few days, and it appears stable. I just ran another test on my connection: average ping was 35.4 ms (34.3–37.8 ms), with 0% packet loss across 10 probes. Thanks for looking into this.


Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • 2 days ago


Status changed to Solved Railway • 2 days ago


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