In a rare case of misconfiguration, Google accidentally erased the account of a $125 billion pension fund, causing inconvenience for nearly half a million UniSuper members who were unable to access their superannuation accounts for a week.
The problem resulted from a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud misconfiguration
UniSuper is an Australian superannuation company that provides retirement savings services to employees working in the country’s higher education and research sectors. This means that if you work at a university, college, or research institution in Australia, you may be eligible for UniSuper’s superannuation services to help you save for retirement.
The problem resulted from a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud misconfiguration. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud Worldwide CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members, calling the outage “extremely frustrating and disappointing.”
They reassured members that the downtime was not a cyberattack and that no personal data had been exposed, citing a fault in Google’s cloud service, as reported by the Guardian.
The outage was caused by “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” they confirmed.
The duo stated that it was an “isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” stating that “this should not have happened.”
They stated that “Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption” and is taking steps to prevent it from happening again.
Service was gradually restored more than a week after the system fell. Although investment account balances originally reflected the previous week’s data, UniSuper informed members that adjustments would be made as quickly as feasible.
In 2023, UniSuper shifted a significant portion of its operations to the Google Cloud Platform. The process involved transferring all non-production tasks, including 1,900 virtual machines, to the Google Cloud. Before that, its work was spread across Azure (another cloud platform) and two of its data centers.