What went wrong with UniSuper and Google Cloud? – Daniel Compton
Over the past two weeks, UniSuper, an Australian superannuation fund, faced every cloud user’s nightmare: their cloud provider deleted their data. From May 2nd to 13th, UniSuper experienced a major outage and in several updates blamed Google Cloud for the incident.
The disruption of UniSuper services was caused by a combination of rare issues at Google Cloud that resulted in an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud, which triggered a previously unknown software bug that impacted UniSuper’s systems. This was an unprecedented occurrence, and measures have been taken to ensure this issue does not happen again.
This culminated in a press release, jointly signed by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. They make it sound like an exotic, one-of-a-kind bug in Google Cloud, though after some research, I’m not entirely convinced.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that 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.
