UniSuper and its members know who to blame for UniSuper’s services going offline, with Google Cloud taking responsibility for deleting the superannuation fund’s private cloud account.

UniSuper began experiencing issues on Thursday, May 2, with members unable to access many of the company’s services. The outage continued for several days, and is still causing problems as of the time of writing. The cause of the outage is the most interesting fact, however, with Google Cloud admitting that “an isolated, one-of-a-kind occurrence’ caused UniSuper’s entire private cloud subscription to be canceled.

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” said a joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

UniSuper maintained its data in two geographies, specifically to protect against outages. Unfortunately, when Google Cloud canceled the company’s subscription, it deleted UniSuper’s data in both locations.

Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. The dedication and collaboration between UniSuper and Google Cloud has led to an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.

The incident is not a good look for Google Cloud and raises serious questions about how the issue was able to happen in the first place. Kurian’s response that it was a “one-of-a-kind occurrence” is not reassuring, since this scenario happening even once is one too many times.

While UniSuper has assured its members that their accounts and funds are safe, not being able to access those accounts for the better part of a week is a worst-case scenario for the superannuation fund, a scenario of Google’s creation.

Interestingly, and not unexpectedly, UniSuper has not committed to remaining with Google Cloud following this episode. In response to a FAQ on its site about whether it would continue using Google after the incident, UniSuper had this to say:

UniSuper takes our responsibility to provide reliable services to our members extremely seriously. Our focus is on getting systems back online swiftly, safely and securely.

We are concurrently working closely with Google Cloud on finalising a full root cause analysis. Google Cloud has confirmed that this was an unprecedented, isolated occurrence, and that measures have been taken to ensure this issue does not happen again. We will assess this incident and ensure we are best positioned to deliver services for our members.