A Joint Statement from UniSuper and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian | Hacker News Reader

A Joint Statement from UniSuper and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian

unisuper.com.au

50 pointsmnming19 comments

This sounds like your classic "GCP Locked/Deleted my account automatically" post that we get in HN every few months, but now it affected a larger player

I don't understand how this isn't a bigger deal. No public COE (correction of errors) for what happened on the google side? Without a public COE from Google I don't understand how anyone could use GCE for a serious production system.

I came here expecting this to be a bigger deal already. My favorite quote from the Guardian article:

“While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...

This is as comical as it would get by Google Cloud. “Unprecedented” event, only it’s happened so many times that at this point stories like these can’t surprise anyone.

Anyone at GCP willing to share some details? That’s quite the drama, I cannot imagine being on-call when that happens

> inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription

The real question here is who pushed the misconfiguration that led to account deletion ? If was Google, it looks really, really bad on them especially considering they also seemed to have deleted their backups.

It was Google's fault, see also: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...

Why does this seem to be a uniquely GCP issue? Smaller companies posted on here about this issue with GCP yet none/very rare with AWS/Azure.

> deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.

This is unclear. What is a "private cloud subscription" in GCP? Do they mean the Organization got deleted?

Based on communications I've gotten in the past, I think this is how GCP will refer to VMWare Engine

Pretty bad. If you want true resilience, you need to go multi-cloud. Good thing they had other backups...

If the "professionals" fuck up this bad you might as well go back to running your own stuff.

For anyone who didn't know Google apparently deleted (like in making it unrecoverable) a larger customers subscription (and GCP data) and also all backups as far as it sounds. The customer luckily had their own backups elsewhere outside of GCP.

That's insane.

If it was me I would have just assumed Google had sunsetted Google Cloud like all the rest.

Imagine if a bank, hospital or government agency was taken out by something like this.

GCP does have customers in each of the above segments, I suppose we’re just lucky they weren’t affected.

It was the records of $100 billion dollars in retirement assets that was deleted by Google. Not a small deal, and far more than many small banks.

I am, unfortunately, a customer of the retirement firm, UniSuper.

UniSuper is a large financial organisation. It’s managing $100 billion plus in pension funds.

I think because it’s an Australian company the reported news hasn’t been picked up more as nobody knows who they are. The wording of the official press releases has also been carefully worded/managed to reduce what is really damaging news for the GCP sales department who are on a big push in Oceania for the large corporate companies dangling free credits.

Surprised Google has never heard of soft delete.

Google restricts that to PI of product they sell to advertisers, like all your browsing history or YT videos.

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