Imagine that overnight you no longer have access to your savings account or your retirement pension. The situation would be a bit stressful for the first few hours. But after a week, there would be cause for concern. However, this is what more than 620,000 members of the Australian UniSuper fund experienced, whose services were suddenly deleted from the Google Cloud storage platform. The result, according to GAFAM, of “an unprecedented bad configuration” and “unique of its kind”. Half a million members of the fund therefore found themselves without any means of accessing their retirement pensions during the time this incident lasted.
UniSuper CEO Peter Chun wrote to members on Wednesday evening, explaining that the outage was not the result of any cyber attack. The businessman wanted to be reassuring and assured that no personal data had been stolen following this outage. On the other hand, Peter Chun did not fail to point the finger at the responsibility of Google’s cloud service. “This is an unprecedented event,” acknowledged, for his part, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “This should never have happened.”
More precisely, this situation would have been caused by an “unknown software bug” leading to the deletion of UniSuper’s subscription to Google’s private Cloud and therefore, to the automatic disappearance of its account and its services from the storage space. online from Google. “This shouldn’t have happened. Google has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken steps to ensure that it does not happen again,” Peter Chun and Thomas Kurian assured in a joint statement.
Furthermore, the pension fund was unlucky. While UniSuper normally set up a duplication of its account in two geographical areas, in order to have a backup service in the event of a breakdown, the deletion of its subscription to Google Cloud also led to the deletion of its services in the geographical emergency area.
Enough to cause Peter Chun to break into a cold sweat because UniSuper manages around 125 billion in funds. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) also monitored the situation when it learned of the inadvertent removal of the fund. “An insurer may not be directly responsible for its website going offline in the event of a network gateway failure, but it will be responsible for the result,” the entity reminded the Financial Standard. . “That is, the inability for its clients to file compensation claims or access other services.”
Restoring the funds in question was not an easy task. It was thanks to backups in place with another provider that UniSuper was finally able to relaunch its services on Google Cloud. “Restoring the UniSuper Private Cloud instance required an incredible amount of focus, effort and partnership between our teams to enable a full restoration of all core systems,” confirm the two CEOs in their joint statement . On Thursday, May 9, the funds still showed last week’s balances and were to be updated gradually.
Still, the situation remains embarrassing for Google. As recalled by the Australian media, The Register, UniSuper transferred its online services to Google Cloud in 2023, after having hosted them for a long time between Microsoft’s Azur platform and its own data centers. “Less than a year later, the fund suffered a long outage from Google,” the newspaper points out.
“I generally think that using services like Google Cloud makes much more sense than trying to do things internally,” also testifies on X (ex-Twitter) the researcher Michael Nielsen and one of the many members of UniSuper. “But maybe that’s less true than I thought. I am, I must admit, very relieved,” he describes, joyfully announcing that he will once again have access to his retirement savings.
