Google "accidentally" deleted the 3.2 million billion VND pension fund

In a rare incident, Google accidentally deleted the accounts of the $125 billion UniSuper pension fund, disrupting more than half a million members of the fund, leaving them unable to access their retirement accounts for a week.

UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that provides retirement savings services to employees working in the domestic higher education and research sector.

The incident was caused by a “unique” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud Global CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members, acknowledging the inconvenience and disappointment caused by the incident. They assured fund members that the incident was not a cyberattack and clarified that no personal data was compromised.

They said the outage was due to a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper's cloud account being deleted, something that has never happened with Google Cloud before.

The disruption arose from an unprecedented chain of events, the two executives said. “This was a unique incident that has never happened to any Google Cloud customer globally before. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and is taking steps to ensure this does not happen again,” the joint statement said.

Fortunately, UniSuper was eventually able to restore operations as the fund had a backup available with another provider.

While Google says the bug has never happened before with Cloud, the potential for glitches and outages is a cause for concern for companies and governments that are increasingly moving more of their data to cloud software providers.

Google Cloud counts about 60% of the world’s 1,000 largest companies and 90% of innovative AI unicorns as customers, the company said this year. In addition, nearly half a million companies globally use Google Cloud as a “platform as a service” or customer-facing tool, including many major banks.