In a rare and unsettling incident, the account of a $125 billion pension fund, UniSuper, was inadvertently deleted by Google, causing widespread disruption for over half a million members. UniSuper, an Australian superannuation fund catering to employees in the higher education and research sectors, faced a week-long outage, leaving members unable to access their superannuation accounts. This incident, attributed to a misconfiguration on Google Cloud, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian. HERE IS A SPECIAL
The outage stemmed from an unprecedented misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services, leading to the deletion of its subscription. While UniSuper and Google Cloud assured members that the disruption was not the result of a cyber-attack and that no personal data was compromised, it nonetheless caused significant inconvenience and concern among users. Both CEOs acknowledged the frustration and disappointment experienced by members, emphasizing that the incident was a unique occurrence and not reflective of Google Cloud’s usual operations.Following the outage, UniSuper and Google Cloud worked diligently to identify the events that led to the disruption and implemented measures to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future. Services were gradually restored over the course of a week, with investment account balances initially reflecting previous figures. UniSuper reassured its members that updates would be expedited to minimize any further inconvenience caused by the disruption.
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