Google Cloud accidentally deleted a $125bn pension fund account

Google recently made a serious mistake when it accidentally erased the private account of the $125 billion UniSuper pension fund in its Google Cloud service. As a result, more than half a million members of the UniSuper fund could not access their accounts for a week. It is noted that UniSuper is one of the largest pension funds in Australia.

Here's What We Know

The service was restored thanks to a backup UniSuper account with another cloud provider. All services were restored on 2 May. In a statement obtained by The Guardian on 8 May, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun stressed that this was a "one-of-a-kind event that should not have happened".

They also assured that Google Cloud has identified the causes of this outage and has taken steps to prevent similar incidents in the future. This incident has raised concerns about the security and reliability of cloud services, especially for large financial services companies.

Source: Quartz, The Guardian