Google blunder deletes $125 billion pension fund account, disrupting half a million members

UniSuper CEO and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian expressed their deep regrets over the lapse.

Google inadvertently deleted the account of Australia's UniSuper, a massive pension fund worth $125 billion. This blunder left over half a million UniSuper members unable to access their superannuation accounts for an entire week, causing widespread frustration and concern.

UniSuper, a key player in Australia's superannuation landscape, provides retirement savings services to employees in higher education and research sectors. The outage, which affected university, college, and research institution employees, stemmed from what is being described as a "one-of-a-kind" misconfiguration on Google Cloud.

In a joint statement, UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian expressed their deep regrets over the incident. "The outage is extremely frustrating and disappointing," they said, emphasising that it was not the result of a cyber-attack. They reassured members that no personal data was compromised and attributed the disruption to a glitch in Google's cloud service.

The core of the issue was an "unprecedented sequence of events" during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services, which led to the inadvertent deletion of the fund's Private Cloud subscription. This rare misconfiguration highlights the vulnerabilities and potential risks involved in cloud computing, even with major players like Google.

"The outage is extremely frustrating and disappointing," reiterated Chun and Kurian. Their joint apology aimed to pacify the affected members by ensuring that measures are being taken to prevent such incidents in the future.

The Guardian reported on this lapse, highlighting the scale of the disruption and the response from both organisations to address the problem and restore services. This incident spotlights the critical importance of rigorous checks and safeguards in cloud service management to avoid similar occurrences that can have far-reaching impacts on users.