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Google Cloud explains how it accidentally deleted a customer account (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google's end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.

UniSuper's mistake was relying too much on Google Cloud even for critical backups.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members.

Two weeks later, Google Cloud's internal review of the problem is finished, and the company has a blog post up detailing what happened.

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.

During its many downtime updates, UniSuper indicated it did not have access to Google Cloud backups and had to dig into a third-party (presumably less up-to-date) store to get back up and running.

These backups have minimized data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration."

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