Over half a million UniSuper fund members experienced a week-long outage, unable to access their superannuation accounts due to a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration.” This misconfiguration led to the deletion of the financial services provider’s private cloud account, as revealed by Google and UniSuper.
Service restoration for UniSuper customers began on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances will reflect the previous week’s figures, and UniSuper stated that updates will be made as quickly as possible.
Peter Chun, CEO of UniSuper, addressed the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, clarifying that the outage was not due to a cyber-attack and that no personal data was exposed. Chun identified Google’s cloud service as the source of the issue.
In a joint statement with Google Cloud’s global CEO, Thomas Kurian, Chun apologized to members for the outage, describing it as “extremely frustrating and disappointing.”
They explained that the outage was caused by a misconfiguration leading to the deletion of UniSuper’s cloud account, a situation unprecedented for Google Cloud.
“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,” the pair said.
“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”
Typically, UniSuper has duplication across two geographies to ensure easy restoration if one service fails. However, the deletion of the cloud subscription caused data loss across both locations. Fortunately, UniSuper restored services thanks to backups maintained with another provider.
“These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” the pair said.
“Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems.
“The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.”
UniSuper manages approximately $125 billion in funds.
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