Richard Speed (via Hacker News):
Google’s Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has weighed in on the UniSuper fiasco and confirmed that UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription was accidentally deleted.
In a joint statement with UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, Kurian admitted that an “inadvertent misconfiguration” during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services resulted in the deletion of the subscription.
In a cascade of catastrophe familiar to anyone using duplication, the deletion of the account resulted in deletion across other regions.
Two weeks later, they are finally fully restored:
Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.
The customer isn’t exactly small either - “UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that provides superannuation services to employees of Australia’s higher education and research sector. The fund has over 620,000 members and $120 billion in assets (funds under management and total member accounts at 7 July 2021).”
Previously: