Google 'misconfiguration’ locks over half a million users out of pension fund

Over half a million users were unable to access their pension funds for a week, after a Google “misconfiguration” deleted the provider’s private cloud account. Fund management company UniSuper’s cloud account was deleted after an “unprecedented” series of events at Google that led to the issue.

In an extraordinary statement, both Google and Unisuper apologised and explained the situation. 

The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, said:

“The disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said.

UniSuper has backups stored in two Google Cloud locations to minimise risk of lost data. However since the account was deleted, both locations were lost. Luckily, it had backups with another provider so was able to recover the lost information. 

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” the statement said. 

Lessons from the debacle 

More than 60% of funded GenAI startups, nearly 90% of GenAI unicorns, and nearly 60% of the world's 1,000 largest companies are Google Cloud customers. While the issue with UniSuper is unprecedented, it does show that an increasing amount of companies are reliant on a third party. You might do nothing wrong and yet a mistake by the third party could be catastrophic.

• You should always have a backup. UniSuper had a backup with another provider, without which, hundreds of thousands of people could have lost their pensions. You don’t have to have another third-party provider - regularly downloading information, so you at least have the most recent version, is also an option. 
• Own the mistake and apologise. The statement explained the issue, reassured customers and acknowledged their frustration. This will go a long way to retaining and reclaiming customer faith

Using third-party cloud systems can make your data storage more efficient and cheaper, but it’s not without risk. Mitigating those risks is an important part of modern-day business.