Google accidentally deleted the account of a $125 billion pension fund. In a rare incident of misconfiguration, Google reportedly caused disruption for over half a million UniSuper members, who couldn’t access their superannuation accounts for a week.
UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that offers retirement savings services to employees working in the higher education and research sectors in the country. This means that if you work in universities, colleges, or research institutions in Australia, you may have access to UniSuper’s superannuation services to help you save for retirement.
Google’s ‘Misconfiguration’!
Reportedly, the incident occurred from a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members. They explained ” The outage is extremely frustrating and disappointing.”
They assured members that the outage was not a cyber-attack and clarified that no personal data was compromised, blaming a glitch in Google’s cloud service, as reported by the Guardian.
An apology!
The disruption is expected to rise from “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” they confirmed.
Furthermore, both Peter Chun and Thomas Kurian explained that the mishap was an “isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally.” Lastly, the pair stated that “this should not have happened.”
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