UniSuper, the Australian mutual fund overseeing investments for universities and research institutions, with 620,000 individuals affected, faced an issue where their online system was inaccessible for over a week due to a mismanaged configuration by Google Cloud, leading to UniSuper’s organizational account being inadvertently removed from the system.
This incident was acknowledged by Google Cloud’s engineering side, with Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, accepting responsibility towards UniSuper’s fund members. This unprecedented event, stated as a rare occurrence in Google Cloud’s history of global client service, currently lacks detailed information on the root cause, and remains publicly disclosed.
Typically, Google Cloud maintains backup reserves in other regional data centers, yet this instance did not entail a system outage or hardware failure, but rather the deletion of customer accounts, resulting in the removal of the corresponding backup set as well. While UniSuper’s data remained intact due to backups with other service providers, the primary system running on Google Cloud encountered prolonged disruptions.
Google’s efforts involved deploying additional engineering resources over the past week to restore the system, leading to some functionality being reinstated for UniSuper.
Source: UniSuper, Guardian, IT News
TLDR: UniSuper faced an online system accessibility issue due to a Google Cloud misconfiguration, with their organizational account inadvertently deleted. Despite some functionality being restored after additional engineering support from Google, the incident underscores the importance of backup strategies in cloud services.
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