UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account WIPED OUT at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service.
How long before this happens in WF. We are no longer in control of our services when in cloud
A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian
UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.
While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.
This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.
Why did the outage last so long?
UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies.
Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.
What’s next?
UniSuper and Google Cloud have been working around the clock on a resolution. The completion of the restoration swiftly, safely and securely remains Google Cloud and UniSuper’s top priority.