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Never forget what happened to Australian UniSuper when google accidentally deleted their account. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...

"More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed."



Here is the official Google writeup of the UniSuper incident. A lot more details than a news media summary.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...


Mozilla had an outage in 2022 when gcp deployed an unannounced change.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/02/retrospective-and-technica...


> Never forget what happened to Australian UniSuper

I don't know if media or the readers are at fault. The article doesn't even make sense.

> More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access

If Google really caused such a huge loss there would be no joint statement. The buyer i.e. UniSuper would be trying to sue them. The fact that it is a joint statement implies the two parties are sharing the responsibility. Now complaining about UniSuper is boring and so spinning it on Google Cloud gets clicks.


The word at the time was that they were heavily compensated by goog (I guess the company was lucky their issue got some much media attention).


I’m a customer of Unisuper - the daily update emails definitely pinned the blame on the service provider.


This is completely false. TA account because I am not authorized to speak on this, but that’s not at all what happened.


The official statement from google:

“During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period.”

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

Are you saying that Google lied about being responsible for it? What would they possibly gain from that?


> Are you saying that Google lied about being responsible for it?

The original news article says Google deleted the account. As per your quote and official statement - no account has been deleted.

So that news article is completely false. Point proven.


The difference between deleting an account and deleting everything in the account is semantics.

Or did I get poe's lawed?


I think the latest public information was that it was a VMware "private cloud", a set of VMs, in GCP which accidentally had an expiration date set. So no GCP projects/billing accounts were ever deleted. Is that accurate?


What is an expiration date if not a scheduled deletion date? Is it a soft-deletion? It's clearly ambiguous to me, who has no previous knowledge of this event before a minute ago. "Google auto deletes account at expiration date" seems to be a reasonable interpretation of what's been presented to me so far.


We should always maintain a healthy skepticism in either direction, and maybe supporting that is your purpose, but: why should your throwaway account be believed?


Well go on then, tell us more.




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