Google’s accidental deletion of UniSuper’s private cloud account holding $125 billion caused over 620,000 people to lose their pension/retirement fund. For about a week after that, the members of the Australia-based pension fund could not access their accounts, and in some instances, the figures shown were also inaccurate.
The CEO of UniSuper, Peter Chu, had reached out to the aggrieved clients, their retirement funds now under uncertainty, assuring them of their accounts. However, misconfiguration, although rare, has spread doubts among other cloud users regarding the safety of their accounts. Both CEOs also released a joint statement last Wednesday regarding the cause of the deletion.
It was only this last Thursday that services started getting restored where accounts reflected the previous week’s figures with the superannuation fund guaranteeing updates as soon as possible. This was partly possible due to the backups with UniSuper through other service providers that promise minimal loss to its users, making it easier for both companies to restore the deleted data.
“Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications,” explained both CEOs of the companies.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.
“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”
