Google Cloud deletes, then recovers, $135 billion pension fund
- Not the customer’s fault, and not a system breakdown: Google
- Company says one-time operator error caused the data deletion
- Data for hundreds of thousands of pensions recovered in 2 weeks
The Google Cloud logo is being displayed at their pavilion during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024. Google Cloud, a suite of cloud computing services by the American multinational corporation, is offering modular cloud services such as computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning. (Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
maylen
(NewsNation) — Google Cloud says it’s fixed the issue that led to one of its servers wiping out a multi-billion-dollar pension fund in Australia — all because someone forgot to fill in one box on one form.
“The disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events,” Google said in a statement explaining the issue and the fix.
The problem for Google and its Australian customer, a pension fund called UniSuper, was one year in the making. In early 2023, Google Cloud operators were adjusting the capacity for one of UniSuper’s private clouds.
In doing so, one of the operators failed to check one box on a form — a “blank parameter” in tech terms. That caused the system to, by default, put a one-year term on the data in that specific system.
When the year was up earlier this year, the data was deleted. And what a deletion it was: $135 billion AU (about $90 billion U.S.) in pension funds for 647,000 people in Australia.
Google says it was not the customer’s fault and not the system’s fault. And, because the customer didn’t choose to delete all its funds, the system didn’t notify the customer it was going to happen.
It took about two weeks to recover the data.
“The customer and Google teams worked 24×7 over several days to recover the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud, restore the network and security configurations, restore its applications, and recover data to restore full operations,” said the Google blog post.
