“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.”
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?