The incident occurred from a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. (Representational)

In a uncommon incident of misconfiguration, Google by accident deleted the account of a $125 billion pension fund, inflicting disruption for over half one million UniSuper members, who could not entry their superannuation accounts for per week. 

UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that provides retirement financial savings providers to workers working within the increased training and analysis sectors within the nation. Which means that in case you work in universities, faculties, or analysis establishments in Australia, you will have entry to UniSuper’s superannuation providers that will help you save for retirement.

The incident occurred from a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud international CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members, acknowledging the outage as “extraordinarily irritating and disappointing.” They assured members that the outage was not a cyber-attack and clarified that no private knowledge was compromised, blaming a glitch in Google’s cloud service, as reported by the Guardian.  

The disruption arose from “an unprecedented sequence of occasions whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration throughout provisioning of UniSuper’s Non-public Cloud providers led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Non-public Cloud subscription,” they confirmed. 

The pair claimed that it was an “remoted, ‘one-of-a-kind prevalence’ that has by no means earlier than occurred with any of Google Cloud’s shoppers globally,” stating that “this could not have occurred.” 

They assured that “Google Cloud has recognized the occasions that led to this disruption” and took measures to forestall this from occurring once more. 

Providers have been steadily reinstated greater than per week after the system went offline. Though funding account balances initially mirrored the earlier week’s figures, UniSuper assured members that updates can be expedited as a lot as attainable.

In 2023, UniSuper shifted a good portion of its operations to Google Cloud Platform. The method concerned transferring all non-production duties, together with 1,900 digital machines, to Google Cloud. Earlier than that, its work was unfold throughout Azure (one other cloud platform) and two of its knowledge centres.