[peterbmarks]

Never forget what happened to Australian UniSuper when google accidentally deleted their account. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...

"More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed."

[slyall]

Here is the official Google writeup of the UniSuper incident. A lot more details than a news media summary.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

[politelemon]

Mozilla had an outage in 2022 when gcp deployed an unannounced change.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/02/retrospective-and-technica...

[re-thc]

> Never forget what happened to Australian UniSuper

I don't know if media or the readers are at fault. The article doesn't even make sense.

> More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access

If Google really caused such a huge loss there would be no joint statement. The buyer i.e. UniSuper would be trying to sue them. The fact that it is a joint statement implies the two parties are sharing the responsibility. Now complaining about UniSuper is boring and so spinning it on Google Cloud gets clicks.

[arresin]

The word at the time was that they were heavily compensated by goog (I guess the company was lucky their issue got some much media attention).

[siquick]

I’m a customer of Unisuper - the daily update emails definitely pinned the blame on the service provider.

[throwawaygoog31]

This is completely false. TA account because I am not authorized to speak on this, but that’s not at all what happened.

[paulgb]

The official statement from google:

“During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period.”

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

Are you saying that Google lied about being responsible for it? What would they possibly gain from that?

[re-thc]

> Are you saying that Google lied about being responsible for it?

The original news article says Google deleted the account. As per your quote and official statement - no account has been deleted.

So that news article is completely false. Point proven.

[Dylan16807]

The difference between deleting an account and deleting everything in the account is semantics.

Or did I get poe's lawed?

[nielsole]

I think the latest public information was that it was a VMware "private cloud", a set of VMs, in GCP which accidentally had an expiration date set. So no GCP projects/billing accounts were ever deleted. Is that accurate?

[antifa]

What is an expiration date if not a scheduled deletion date? Is it a soft-deletion? It's clearly ambiguous to me, who has no previous knowledge of this event before a minute ago. "Google auto deletes account at expiration date" seems to be a reasonable interpretation of what's been presented to me so far.

[smitty1e]

We should always maintain a healthy skepticism in either direction, and maybe supporting that is your purpose, but: why should your throwaway account be believed?

[tjpnz]

Well go on then, tell us more.