Google Accidentally Erases Data of $135 Billion Pension Fund

UniSuper, a preeminent superannuation provider in the Australian finance industry, with a staggering 647,000 members, unravels a cataclysmic event; bared to the bone, Google Cloud’s service inauspiciously wiped out crucial primary data and their backups, in a seemingly implausible turn of events. Nevertheless, acting in accordance with industry best practice, the $135 billion ($89.56 billion) fund developed a contingency plan wherein they conducted a backup on an alternate service. The prolonged and laborious restoration exercise commenced on May 2, with services rendered operable again on May 15, according to the company’s incident log. UniSuper’s website features a collaborative statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian concerning the disaster. In his statement, Thomas Kurian confirmed the disruption was the aftermath of an unprecedented chain of events, ultimately resulting in the obliteration of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. As he stated, “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.” The communiqué further revealed that when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both geographies despite the duplication of geographies to address outages and loss. Apparently, the lapse occurred from an erroneous value in the creation of a one-year subscription instead of a perpetual one utilizing the private cloud. The firm restored data from another cloud provider due to the failure of Google Cloud’s safeguards against account deletion. A prominent figure in the field of technology, Mr. Compton expressed concern over Google Cloud’s poor communication of the incident and its resolution. The abstruse language used in the press release failed to provide any technical details of the occurrence, and by being silent, Google Cloud had allowed millions to assume it had deleted an entire company’s Google Cloud environment. Mr. Compton remains hopeful that the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the country’s superannuation regulator, will conduct an investigation into the strange events