TapTechNews reports on May 11, according to The Guardian, a previously unprecedented major configuration error occurred with Google Cloud Services recently, leading to the deletion of cloud subscription accounts of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund, with service disruptions lasting a week.
UniSuper is a non-profit pension fund managing approximately $125 billion (equivalent to around 903.7 billion yuan) with over half a million investors.
The incident started on May 2, when UniSuper investors reported being unable to access their accounts. Services were mostly restored by May 9, but some account information has yet to be fully updated.
Fortunately, the funds in the investors’ accounts were not affected by this incident.
According to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, the service disruption at UniSuper was caused by a series of unprecedented events.
During the configuration of UniSuper's private cloud service, an unintended configuration error eventually led to the deletion of UniSuper’s private cloud subscription.
This kind of incident had never occurred in the previous operations of Google Cloud. Google Cloud has since identified the specific cause of this incident and has taken measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Although UniSuper had backed up data in two cloud regions of Google Cloud, the major incident caused by the account deletion led to the simultaneous loss of both backups, rendering them ineffective.
Fortunately, UniSuper had data backed up with other storage service providers, which greatly minimized the losses from this incident and accelerated the process of restoring data on Google Cloud.