What happened

As a result, more than half a million UniSuper fund members were unable to access their accounts for nearly a week. Fortunately, the company had a backup account with another cloud provider, so the service was restarted on May 2.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun said in a joint statement that this was “a first of its kind” and had never happened before to any of Google Cloud customers worldwide. Presumably, in this way, the company tried to reassure other customers not to rush to stop cooperation due to this incident.

This shouldn’t have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this error and has taken steps to ensure it does not happen again.
– he said in the statement.

They also stated that reason for deletion was “unintentional misconfiguration”, whatever that means. The crash caused the retirement fund subscription to be deleted, resulting in the deletion of all files.

The situation was made worse by the deletion of not only the files on the main server, but also all copies of them duplicated by Google in two geographical regions as protection against interruptions and loss. “When UniSuper private cloud subscription was deleted it resulted in deletion in both regions”– added company representatives.

The fact is that such replication can provide protection in case of network disconnection, for example, due to a server failure or power outage – then the system will pull data from somewhere else. But when they are removed at the program level with a central command, they disappear from everywhere.

While Google says this error has never happened before in the cloud, the potential for disruption and outages is likely to worry companies and governments that are increasingly moving their data to cloud software providers. This year the company reported: Approximately 60% of the world’s top 1000 companies are Google Cloud customers and 90% of companies are developing artificial intelligence.

• Nearly half a million companies worldwide, including Volkswagen and the Royal Bank of Canada, use Google Cloud on a platform-as-a-service basis or as a customer service tool.
• The US government and intelligence services are also increasingly using cloud services for data storage.
• The US National Security Agency signed a $10 billion deal with Amazon to move intelligence surveillance data to the company’s cloud.
• And the Pentagon signed a $9 billion contract with Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Amazon for cloud computing services.