In a truly "unprecedented" event, Google *POOF*ed the cloud-hosted data for "UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members". ALL DATA. GONE.

Now, lest we think that UniSuper wimped out on their infrastructure design with their Google cloud hosting, they didn't. They paid for their hosting to be properly backed up and to be geographically diversified.

And somehow Google managed to wipe out all of it. Data: gone. Backups: gone.

The details of how Google threw all of this into the bit bucket is unknown.

The saving grace is that UniSuper was smart to diversify their cloud hosting and also hosted with a second provider, and were able to reestablish their infrastructure through recovering from their second hosting provider. However, it cost them two weeks of downtime, plus incremental restoration and account transaction processing. So not only was their IT team stressed beyond belief, but their customer service team were constantly having to tell people what was going on and having to answer why account balances were not correct.

This is supposed to be utterly impossible, they were also quite emphatic that this was not a hacking event. Additionally, most systems should be doing what's known as 'soft deletes' where if something is deleted, it just appears to have gone away and is invisible to the outside world but is still recoverable. Apparently this was all gone gone. Thus far no other cloud services provider is crowing that this won't happen if you switch to us, because clearly no one thought it could happen at Google until it did.

Google is quite sincere about saying 'steps being put in place to prevent this from happening again', what about explaining in somewhat abstracted terms what allowed it to happen in the first place? That would make the IT administrators in the world a lot happier!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/