I wrote about the UniSuper issue at the time: https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper. It was a pretty nasty bug where their VMWare environment was created with a one-year expiry date, but was one "resource" from the perspective of Google Cloud.
"UniSuper’s production Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) private cloud was automatically deleted one year after it’s creation due to a misconfiguration in how it was created. When it was created, there was a bug in the creation script which passed a null value."
That's pretty amazing. Not due to a cascading failure from someone changing a config deep inside of a system that caused a bunch of unintended effects, just someone who messed up writing a shell script?
That's one footgun, but then pushing that into production and actually deleting things rather than queuing them to be deleted later after a sanity check until the system is stable, and not informing users that the 1 year policy existing, (probably) not documenting that the expiry exists, not testing 'what happens if we pass in null?', etc are a whole series of mistakes.
This was less "Oh look, a rare edge case that was easy to miss!" and more "We don't bother putting guardrails into critical systems. Oops!"
That's pretty amazing. Not due to a cascading failure from someone changing a config deep inside of a system that caused a bunch of unintended effects, just someone who messed up writing a shell script?