Google Cloud Accident Affects Australian Pension Fund

TapTechNews June 1, a very serious accident occurred in Google Cloud in May this year. All data and services hosted on Google Cloud by the Australian pension fund UniSuper, including backups, could not be accessed.

The UniSuper fund manages assets worth up to 135 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 980.1 billion RMB) for more than 600,000 members. This service occurred on May 2 and was interrupted for 2 weeks. It barely resumed operations by hurriedly restoring from a third-party backup.

In Google Cloud's blog post on May 25, it was stated that when someone in the company was configuring UniSuper's private cloud service using an internal tool, accidentally left a parameter blank.

This seemingly small mistake had disastrous consequences: UniSuper's account was marked for automatic deletion after a fixed period.

Google has released a brief note on this matter:

During the initial deployment of Google Cloud's Virtual Machine Engine (GCVE) private cloud for a customer using an internal tool, the Google operator inadvertently misconfigured the GCVE service due to leaving a parameter blank.

This caused unexpected and unknown consequences where the customer's GCVE private cloud was implicitly set for a fixed term and automatically deleted at the end of the term. Both the event trigger and downstream system behaviors have been corrected to ensure this does not happen again.

Google pointed out that after several days of around-the-clock efforts by the customer and Google team, the customer's GCVE private cloud was restored, network and security configurations were restored, applications and data were restored, and full operations were resumed.