A $125 billion pension fund’s account was inadvertently erased by Google in a rare case of misconfiguration. This resulted in disruption for more than 500,000 UniSuper members, who were unable to access their superannuation accounts for a week.

Employees in Australia’s research and higher education sectors can access retirement savings services through UniSuper, an Australian superannuation fund. This implies that you might be able to use UniSuper’s superannuation services to help you save for retirement if you work in Australian universities, colleges, or research facilities.

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

The outage was caused by “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” they stated.

The two asserted that “this should not have happened” and that it was a “single, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally.”

They assured that “Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption” and took measures to prevent this from happening again.

Services were gradually reinstated more than a week after the system went offline. Although investment account balances initially mirrored the previous week’s figures, UniSuper assured members that updates would be expedited as much as possible.

In 2023, UniSuper shifted a significant portion of its operations to Google Cloud Platform. The process involved transferring all non-production tasks, including 1,900 virtual machines, to Google Cloud. Before that, its work was spread across Azure (another cloud platform) and two of its data centres.

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