UniSuper fund members were unable to access their superannuation accounts for more than a week due to a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration in Google Cloud, which led to the deletion of the financial services provider’s private cloud account. Services for UniSuper customers began to be restored on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. The investment account balances initially reflected last week’s figures, with plans to update them as quickly as possible.
UniSuper CEO Peter Chun assured the fund’s 620,000 members that the outage was not caused by a cyber-attack and that no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun attributed the issue to Google’s cloud service.
In a joint statement from Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, both parties apologized to members for the outage and acknowledged the frustration and disappointment it caused. They explained that the deletion of UniSuper’s private cloud account was due to a misconfiguration, an unprecedented event for Google Cloud.
Although UniSuper typically has redundancy in place in two geographies to ensure service restoration in case of a failure, the deletion of the fund’s cloud subscription led to the loss of data in both geographies. However, UniSuper was able to restore services eventually because the fund had backups with another provider.
The restoration process involved an extensive recovery of core systems, including hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications. UniSuper, which manages approximately $125 billion in funds, worked in collaboration with Google Cloud to achieve this extensive recovery.
Original Story: Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ | Superannuation | The Guardian
