Google Cloud Accidentally Deletes UniSuper’s $125 Billion Pension Account
Google deleted the Australia-based UniSuper pension fund account, resulting in a week-long outage for users. Learn more about the incident and the importance of backups.
- Approximately 600,000 UniSuper pension fund members could not access their accounts for around a week as Google Cloud inadvertently deleted the funds account.
- UniSuper is a leading provider of retirement savings services for employees in the Australian research and higher education field.
Google Cloud accidentally deleted the account of one of its major customers, a $125 billion Australian pension fund, including all its backups. As a result, over 600,000 pension fund users have been facing an outage for around two weeks. UniSuper, the pension fund, fortunately, has backups with other service providers, which bodes well for the recovery process. There has been no sign of a cyberattack causing the disruption.
According to a Google Cloud spokesperson, the incident resulted from an accidental misconfiguration during provisioning, which canceled UniSuper’s private cloud subscription. Google Cloud has assured its customers that steps have been taken to ensure such a disruption does not occur again.
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UniSuper is a leading Australian superannuation fund, especially for employees in the higher education and research industries. The services provided are similar to those of the American 401(k). The fund migrated to Google Cloud in 2023 to streamline its processes. However, the deletions of data across geographies meant that the recovery process lasted for two weeks.
The incident highlights the risks of cloud-based operations and raises the importance of maintaining backups. A multi-cloud solution has been recommended to mitigate similar instances, which can impact even the most prominent and trusted companies in the tech sector.
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