How Google deleted a $125 billion UniSuper pension fund account by accident

In a rare incident of misconfiguration, Google accidentally deleted the account of a $125 billion pension fund, causing inconvenience for more than half a million UniSuper members who were unable to access their retirement accounts for a week.

UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that offers retirement savings services to employees working in the country’s higher education and research sectors. This means if you work at universities, colleges or research institutions in Australia, you can access UniSuper’s retirement services to help you save for retirement.

The incident occurred due to a “one-time” misconfiguration in Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud Global CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members, acknowledging the outage as “extremely frustrating and disappointing.” They assured members that the outage was not a cyberattack and clarified that no personal data was compromised, blaming a glitch in Google’s cloud service, as reported by Guardian.

The outage arose from “an unprecedented sequence of events where an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s private cloud services led to the deletion of UniSuper’s private cloud subscription,” they confirmed.

The pair stated that it was an “isolated and unique occurrence” that has never occurred before with any of Google Cloud’s customers worldwide”, stating that “this should not have happened”.

They assured that “Google Cloud identified the events that led to this outage” and took steps to prevent it from happening again.

Services were gradually restored more than a week after the system went offline. Although investment account balances initially reflected the previous week’s figures, UniSuper assured members that updates would be expedited as much as possible.

In 2023, UniSuper transferred a significant part of its operations to the Google Cloud Platform. The process involved moving all non-production tasks, including 1,900 virtual machines, to Google Cloud. Before that, its work was spread across Azure (another cloud platform) and two of its data centers.