A joint statement from UniSuper and Google reveals the formers outage occurred when Google accidentally deleted UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription.
Released on May 8, UniSuper and Google expanded upon the Australian superannuation fund's recent week-long outage.
Previously described as a "combination of rare issues at Google Cloud" which resulted in an "inadvertent misconfiguration." The update adds to this, saying that the misconfiguration "ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription."
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud described this as a "one-of-a-kind occurrence" and assured that it would not happen again.
The outage lasted for an extended period of time as the subscription was deleted, taking with it UniSuper's two geographies that were intended to provide protection against outages and loss. Fortunately, UniSuper had backups in place with a different service provider.
Understandably, much of the restoration efforts have been concentrated on recovering the deleted environment.
“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,” according to the statement.
As of May 13, UniSuper says that its online services have been restored. "Members are able to log in and view their balance, request investment switches, view investment performance, request withdrawals, and more. We’re still restoring the functionality of our retirement calculators, but this will be back soon."
UniSuper moved a large amount of its workloads to Google Cloud Platform in 2023, having previously split them between Azure and two of its own data centers. The migration included the shifting of all non-production workloads, including 1,900 virtual machines, to Google Cloud.
The superannuation fund experienced an outage in 2017 after a fire in its Port Melbourne facility. The company also had a data center in Mitcham, Victoria.
The fund owns a five percent stake in Vantage Towers, having acquired the share in May 2023 for AU$1 billion (US$676.3m)
