Google Cloud, the service that provides cloud computing resources, made a huge blunder on their side.Â
They accidentally deleted the entire account of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund company that manages about $135 billion and has nearly 647,000 members. This deletion included all the data and backups stored on Google Cloud.
UniSuper had some of their data backed up elsewhere, which saved them from a total loss. The problem started on May 2, and it took until May 15 to get everything back to normal.
The CEOs of both UniSuper and Google Cloud admitted that this was a unique and never-before-seen event caused by a mistake during a technical process. They assured everyone they’ve taken steps to prevent this from happening again.
The reason the problem took so long to fix is that UniSuper stored its data in two different locations to protect against this kind of issue. However, the deletion affected both locations, which is not supposed to happen. Google Cloud has rules to prevent such deletions, but they failed this time.
UniSuper is like a retirement savings account for Australians, where employers contribute as part of employee salaries. Because UniSuper is so large, it got direct attention from the top executives at Google Cloud.
Before this incident, UniSuper had praised their move to Google Cloud for making things more efficient and cost-effective. However, the incident showed the importance of having backups with different providers, as relying on a single service can be risky.
The updates from UniSuper during the outage tried to reassure members that their money was safe, no private data was leaked, and pensions were not affected. They gradually restored their services and confirmed everything was normal by May 15.
There is no technical report yet on the issue, but it’s important to consider how it could affect their decisions on whether to use Google Cloud services in the future.
So, you can save your important data to a safer location instead of totally relying on the cloud or similar services.
Also Read: Google Confirms Drive Issue That May Have Lost Files – Here’s How To Back Up