Google Accidentally Deletes $125 Billion Pension Fund Account
Google Accidentally Deletes $125 Billion Pension Fund Account
Members have been reassured that the downtime was not the result of a cyberattack and that no personal information was accessed.
15th May 2024
UniSuper members in Australia encountered a week-long disruption as Google Cloud accidentally deleted their private cloud account. This affected more than half a million individuals, preventing them from accessing their superannuation accounts. Although service restoration commenced on Thursday, it may take a while for investment balances to accurately reflect current figures.
Employees in Australia’s research and higher education sectors can access retirement savings services through UniSuper, an Australian superannuation company. This implies that you might be able to use UniSuper’s superannuation services to help you save for retirement if you work at Australian universities, colleges or research facilities.
In a joint apology to members, UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian described the disruption as “extremely frustrating and disappointing.” They blamed an issue with Google’s cloud service, as reported by The Guardian, and reassured members that the downtime was not the result of a cyberattack and that no personal information was accessed.
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 stated.
The two asserted that “This should not have happened” and that it was a “single, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally.”
Google Cloud promised that they had “identified the events that led to this disruption” and had taken action to ensure that it would not happen again.
After the system went offline, services were progressively restored more than a week later. While investment account balances at first reflected the numbers from the previous week, UniSuper promised members that changes will be provided as quickly as feasible.
UniSuper moved a sizable chunk of its operations to Google Cloud Platform in 2023. All non-production jobs, including the 1,900 virtual machines, were moved to Google Cloud during this procedure. Prior to then, two of its data centres and Azure, another cloud platform, were used for its operations.
