Google Cloud accidentally deleted a major customer account, causing two weeks of downtime. The customer in question was UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members. The entire account, including all its backups stored on the service, was wiped out.
The disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events where an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. This was confirmed by Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian.
UniSuper had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data. However, the incident has raised serious questions about the reliability and safety of cloud services. As companies increasingly rely on cloud services for their operations, incidents like these underscore the importance of robust backup strategies and the potential risks of relying on a single provider.
Read more: arstechnica.com