Google Cloud Accidentally Deletes Australian Superannuation Fund's Data

The Australian superannuation fund UniSuper had its private cloud data deleted accidentally earlier this month, disrupting the fund’s services for the past couple of weeks. A configuration problem caused Google Cloud to delete UniSuper’s account.

UniSuper, which has AUD 125 billion ($82.73 billion) in assets serving more than 615,000 beneficiaries, is working with Google Cloud to restore and backup the fund’s data. UniSuper said in a statement that it had backups of its data with a separate provider. UniSuper’s systems first went down close to two weeks ago, with it later confirmed the fund’s private cloud was accidentally deleted by Google Cloud.

UniSuper has maintained that the outage was not related to a breach and that at no time was member data accessed or at risk of being accessed. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the prudential regulator of the Australian financial services industry, last week said it was monitoring the outage.

Most UniSuper services are now back online, according to a statement released on Monday from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun. As of Monday, the fund’s website and mobile services have been restored, although the system outage has still shut down some of the fund’s resources, such as a retirement calculator.

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As of Monday, UniSuper members could view their account balances, view their investment performance and request withdrawals, but account balances for members are not up to date due to the system outages.

“UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members. While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis,” Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a joint statement last Wednesday.

According to Kurian, the incident occurred when “an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.”

Google said that the “one-of-a-kind occurrence” had never happened with any of its other clients. According to UniSuper, the fund had duplicate data in two geographies. However, the accidental deletion of the fund’s private cloud subscription caused deletion of its data across both geographies.

With reporting from Financial Standard, which like CIO, is also owned by ISS Stoxx.