Google deletes $125 billion pension fund by accident
In a significant turn of events, Google inadvertently deleted the account of a staggering $125 billion pension fund. This mishap also led to the disruption of over half a million UniSuper members’ accounts, preventing them from accessing their superannuation accounts for a prolonged period of seven days.
As an Australian superannuation fund, UniSuper is committed to providing retirement-saving services to research and higher education employees. If you work in universities, colleges, or research institutions in Australia, UniSuper’s superannuation services can offer a reliable solution to help you save for your retirement.
According to the report, these unfortunate incidents were a result of a unique misconfiguration on Google cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian have jointly issued an apology to the affected members, expressing their disappointment over the outage.
They have also clarified that the sudden mishap was not a cyberattack, blaming it on a glitch in Google’s cloud services. In addition, this incident has raised concerns about safety among the UniSuper members and Google Cloud users.
In 2023, UniSuper made a substantial move of its operations to the Google Cloud Platform. This shift included transferring all non-production tasks, including 1900 virtual machines, to Google Cloud. Prior to this, its operations were distributed across another cloud platform, Azure, and two of its data centers.
Why Did this Outage Last So Long?
As per the media reports, UniSuper faced duplication in two locations to protect against loss and outages. Therefore, data from both geographies was deleted when the deletion occurred.
Also, restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has required more attention, effort, and partnership among our teams to allow an extensive recovery of all the core systems. In addition, the collaboration between Google Cloud and UniSuper has resulted in a fast recovery that incorporates hundreds of Virtual machines, databases, and applications.
Furthermore, UniSuper has backups in place with an extra service provider. These backups have minimized data loss and significantly increased the ability of Google Cloud and Unisuper to complete the restoration.
