The incident occurred due to a 'unique' misconfiguration on Google Cloud. (Representative)
In a rare incident of misconfiguration, Google accidentally deleted the account of a $125 billion pension fund, causing disruption for more than half a million UniSuper members, who were locked out of their retirement accounts for a week.
UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that provides retirement savings services to employees working in the higher education and research sectors in the country. This means that if you work at universities, colleges or research institutions in Australia, you may have access to UniSuper's superannuation services to help you save for retirement.
The incident occurred due to a “unique” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian jointly apologized to members, acknowledging the outage as “extremely frustrating and disappointing.” They assured members that the outage was not a cyber attack and clarified that no personal data had been compromised, blaming an outage in Google's cloud service, as reported by the Guardian.
The disruption stemmed from “an unprecedented series of events where an accidental misconfiguration during the provision of UniSuper's Private Cloud services led to the cancellation of UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription,” they confirmed.
The pair claimed it was an “isolated, 'unique event' that has never happened before to any of Google Cloud's customers worldwide,” stating that “this should not have happened.”
They assured that “Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption” and has taken measures to prevent it from happening again.
Services were gradually restored over a week after the system went offline. Although investment account balances initially reflected the previous week's figures, UniSuper assured members that updates would be made as quickly as possible.
In 2023, UniSuper moved a significant portion of its operations to Google Cloud Platform. The process involved moving all non-production workloads, including 1,900 virtual machines, to Google Cloud. Previously, operations were spread across Azure (another cloud platform) and two of its data centers.
