Google Cloud recently issued a statement regarding UniSuper, a superannuation fund in Australia with over 620,000 members, whose account was accidentally deleted. UniSuper was using Google Cloud VMware Engine Private Cloud, which required manual allocation of capacity through a specific tool. A Google employee using this tool inadvertently left out a crucial piece of information (without specifying what parameter), and the system automatically set this parameter to a default value for a year.
After the predefined year elapsed, UniSuper’s Private Cloud was deleted without prior notification to the customer. However, the backups stored in Google Cloud Storage remained unaffected, and UniSuper had data backups with other providers as well. Google has since discontinued the use of the tool in question, as the system now manages capacity automatically and has verified that no other customers have incorrect configurations set up.
Source: Google Cloud Blog
TLDR: UniSuper’s account on Google Cloud was deleted due to a missing parameter, but backups were preserved, and Google has ceased use of the problematic tool.
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