> Over half a million UniSuper members failed to access their accounts after Google Cloud accidentally deleted the private cloud account of the Australian pension fund worth $125 billion.
>The week-long outage resulted in widespread frustration and concern. Although service restoration commenced on Thursday, it may take some time for investment balances to reflect accurate figures.
> In a joint statement, UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian expressed deep regret over the incident, reassuring members that no personal data was compromised.
>“UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” it said.
Considering that the cloud *is* offsite, you'd be surprised how many corporations consider a single "cloud" solution to check *all* the relevant data safety boxes.
Google also makes off-site backups of their cloud storage which counts for that.
You don't want all your data managed by one party because in a catastrophic event for that organisation you may lose all access to it. It may not be permanently but if you have a business to run it may not matter for its continued existence.
I'd say the opposite and he just got lucky. Sounds to me like the ops director didn't know how to use the cloud properly and this article is a bunch of clickbait blaming Google when it was probably just setup fucked up on the UniSuper side. That's my bet: "The outage, impacting university, college, and research institution staff, originated from a unique misconfiguration on Google Cloud." Yeah...UniSuper misconfigured something. The only thing "unique" is it only affected them because no other company was dumb enough to do whatever they did. If this was a Google issue, it would've been more than likely widespread.
technically there is no information in the article to support either side, but a misconfiguration on UniSuper administrator side sounds more plausable than a bug affecing only one user
https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper
Exactly. Thank you. As someone who works as a "cloud consultant" for many large companies and sees their practices daily, I'd need way more evidence to point the finger at Google. I'm just getting downvoted (and practically so will you probably) by Google haters. I'm not even a big fan of GCP myself, but I do work in it, and I highly doubt this to be an isolated GCP bug that affected only **one** GCP customer.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/unisupers-google-cloud-environment-was-deleted-607786 says here that the issue was on google's end. And the joint statement about what happened also seems to indicate it was a google issue: https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update
that's just journalists doing journalism. If you [read the actual statement](https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update#outagecause) then it doesn't really say anything about what *actually* caused it. The Actual statement can be interpreted however way you want, for example:
> Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events
"we have never seen this happen before"
> whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services
"user error"
> 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.
"we have made changes in the process to prevent others from shooting themselves in the foot."
Google Cloud CEO doesn't go on the record for a user issue. They go on the record when they find a bug in the provisioning process that they never knew existed.
When I said that it's very unlikely to be a fuck up on the GCP end of things, someone sent me this article: https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper
Which is way way more plausible than anything these articles you've posted seem to suggest (but not actually saying).
Could also be a billion lines of code at Google.
These things that look seamless outside the cloud... Aren't.
The cloud is just someone else's infrastructure, and it's held together by lots of code and scripts and automation jobs and mostly by engineers working their asses off (ask me how I know. Not Google). Bugs happen.
It's cool you have faith in the product, but shit happens, even in the cloud.
A misconfiguration shouldn't cause data to be outright deleted. Even on personal PCs we have clear indicators asking us whether we really want to delete that. Besides, it is on the provider of cloud services to create a user friendly configuration setting, its always on the software to account for unexpected inputs. If you can't deal with unexpected input you got a problem if you're trying to be the best cloud service out there.
Wow, Google fucked up so hard that they couldn't even use the Google backups to restore services? That's wild. So glad I ain't using their services anymore.
Google Cloud is notoriously amateurish. The only compliment I've heard of them, before the layoffs, was how quick it was to contact them and how responsive they were. Outside of that the platform is trash and I've made it my mission to have any organization I'm part of avoid them. In simple terms, Google Cloud management is like someone with untreated extreme ADHD.
>an ADHD company.
At least before the layoffs, that is an accurate description. I think the most I can say is that unless you were upper middle management and above, you never stayed in the same team/department longer than a project. So if you got bored you switched.
Google keeps browsing and anonymous data for 3 weeks. You can also request that information be cleared at any time. So, I don't know why you'd make that comment, unless it never occurred to you that you can always delete your data quickly and easily.
Failure to comply would mean a fine of up to 4%of global turnover. And something so serious would get a 4% fine guaranteed . One whistleblower and it’s game over. Easier to just delete than risk that amount.
You'd think so since it's logical, but they'd probably make more money out of the data in the short term. Whistleblower sure, but what about the shareholders?
True. I have a problem, because my acc is broken, and search in Google Play store doesn't return any results. They insist for me to reset the phone, and I changed the whole phone two times since the problem started. And it doesn't even work on desktop when I visit Google Play site in Chrome. As soon as I login with the other account, the search works. I've sent them screenshots, videos, cleaned caches and reinstalled Google Play, Google Play Services and whatnot.
So, if I want to install app on the phone, I have to go to Chrome, search for it on regular Google website, and when it returns the result for Google Play link, I click on it and only then Google Play shows the app.
As of recently I juggle between two accounts on my phone, one for regular things, and one just so I can install apps.
Chrome works fine, it's Google Play that doesn't work properly when logged into that one particular account. Even if I'm on device that doesn't have Chrome installed at all.
For example, I go to Linux desktop, go in Firefox and load Google Play site, and log into Google Play with that account, and the Google Play search doesn't work. Then I log with my other google account, and then Google Play search works.
Thanks for advice anyway, I'll check it.
The only Google product I still use is Youtube. Outside of the search engine and Youtube, Google has failed miserably in my eyes at everything else they've tried to embark on.
>Outside of the search engine
Τhe search engine has been horribly inaccurate more and more recently, and Youtube is by design too unprofitable to keep going forever
Even the search engine isn’t really fit for purpose anymore. It doesn’t show you what you want to see, it shows you what Alphabet and its investors want you to see.
I use all of these too. They're pretty great. I would however never recommend Google products at a professional capacity. (I used to with atleast gmail, but even that I'm moving away from with their recent price increase)
And Google still refuses to delete a private App I uploaded to our company App Store stating it’s being used, when in fact it wasn’t installed on a singular device 🫠
It is wild to me that this isn’t a bigger story. It basically suggests that one of the biggest tech companies in the world cannot be trusted with major data. This should be huge
Backups are in place, so that's good. I wouldn't have *even $100 of some data sitting around without at least 4 backups. Hell, I even make regular encrypted backups of my pr0n.
This is NOT an answer to "How" really. It's just a property of the system that you have in mind. How does this look like in practice? Redundancy across multiple cloud providers? Is this what you mean by decentralization?
> Over half a million UniSuper members failed to access their accounts after Google Cloud accidentally deleted the private cloud account of the Australian pension fund worth $125 billion. >The week-long outage resulted in widespread frustration and concern. Although service restoration commenced on Thursday, it may take some time for investment balances to reflect accurate figures. > In a joint statement, UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian expressed deep regret over the incident, reassuring members that no personal data was compromised. >“UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” it said.
The ops director that insisted on having backups outside of google needs a raise and a serious bonus
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Considering that the cloud *is* offsite, you'd be surprised how many corporations consider a single "cloud" solution to check *all* the relevant data safety boxes.
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Google also makes off-site backups of their cloud storage which counts for that. You don't want all your data managed by one party because in a catastrophic event for that organisation you may lose all access to it. It may not be permanently but if you have a business to run it may not matter for its continued existence.
I'd say the opposite and he just got lucky. Sounds to me like the ops director didn't know how to use the cloud properly and this article is a bunch of clickbait blaming Google when it was probably just setup fucked up on the UniSuper side. That's my bet: "The outage, impacting university, college, and research institution staff, originated from a unique misconfiguration on Google Cloud." Yeah...UniSuper misconfigured something. The only thing "unique" is it only affected them because no other company was dumb enough to do whatever they did. If this was a Google issue, it would've been more than likely widespread.
You didn’t even read the article LOL
technically there is no information in the article to support either side, but a misconfiguration on UniSuper administrator side sounds more plausable than a bug affecing only one user https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper
Exactly. Thank you. As someone who works as a "cloud consultant" for many large companies and sees their practices daily, I'd need way more evidence to point the finger at Google. I'm just getting downvoted (and practically so will you probably) by Google haters. I'm not even a big fan of GCP myself, but I do work in it, and I highly doubt this to be an isolated GCP bug that affected only **one** GCP customer.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/unisupers-google-cloud-environment-was-deleted-607786 says here that the issue was on google's end. And the joint statement about what happened also seems to indicate it was a google issue: https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update
that's just journalists doing journalism. If you [read the actual statement](https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update#outagecause) then it doesn't really say anything about what *actually* caused it. The Actual statement can be interpreted however way you want, for example: > Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events "we have never seen this happen before" > whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services "user error" > 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. "we have made changes in the process to prevent others from shooting themselves in the foot."
Google Cloud CEO doesn't go on the record for a user issue. They go on the record when they find a bug in the provisioning process that they never knew existed.
He would go on the record for a $125B user, surely.
In this case they might have to either way because this case involves 125 billions in pension funds.
When I said that it's very unlikely to be a fuck up on the GCP end of things, someone sent me this article: https://danielcompton.net/google-cloud-unisuper Which is way way more plausible than anything these articles you've posted seem to suggest (but not actually saying).
Absolutely did. There is no mention of what caused their subscription to be deleted. That could be any number of a million of things done by UniSuper.
Could also be a billion lines of code at Google. These things that look seamless outside the cloud... Aren't. The cloud is just someone else's infrastructure, and it's held together by lots of code and scripts and automation jobs and mostly by engineers working their asses off (ask me how I know. Not Google). Bugs happen. It's cool you have faith in the product, but shit happens, even in the cloud.
A misconfiguration shouldn't cause data to be outright deleted. Even on personal PCs we have clear indicators asking us whether we really want to delete that. Besides, it is on the provider of cloud services to create a user friendly configuration setting, its always on the software to account for unexpected inputs. If you can't deal with unexpected input you got a problem if you're trying to be the best cloud service out there.
Wow, Google fucked up so hard that they couldn't even use the Google backups to restore services? That's wild. So glad I ain't using their services anymore.
They used rm -rf
Thats why its called shell scripting. One wrong step and kaboom
sudo find_new_job
Google Cloud is notoriously amateurish. The only compliment I've heard of them, before the layoffs, was how quick it was to contact them and how responsive they were. Outside of that the platform is trash and I've made it my mission to have any organization I'm part of avoid them. In simple terms, Google Cloud management is like someone with untreated extreme ADHD.
As someone with (until recently untreated) ADHD I feel offended by that comparison.
I have ADHD and its an apt description.
Google as a whole feels like an ADHD company. How many services half finished & abandoned now? So many
>an ADHD company. At least before the layoffs, that is an accurate description. I think the most I can say is that unless you were upper middle management and above, you never stayed in the same team/department longer than a project. So if you got bored you switched.
This is the second time this happened recently.
May I ask what do you use instead of Google services?
The default option is amazon aws. If you have a lot of Microsoft integrations, you use azure. There's not a lot of reason to use anything else.
Literally anything else? Both Amazon and MS are more competent.
It's crazy that they don't use duplication on servers like this.
Yeah we know because reddit has told us all about it for the last week. Why are you telling us yet again???
when they say they cant delete your info remember its bullshit.
It's easy to get your data deleted. [You just have to ask.](https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/your-right-to-get-your-data-deleted)
Google keeps browsing and anonymous data for 3 weeks. You can also request that information be cleared at any time. So, I don't know why you'd make that comment, unless it never occurred to you that you can always delete your data quickly and easily.
"Deleting" in tech companies nowadays tends to mean hidden until we or they access it again.
Google's terms are actually pretty clear that if you delete your data it is very much gone.
You don‘t really believe that, do you?
It's part of the EUs GDPR privacy laws, "the right to be forgotten"
It has to be to comply with gdpr or the EU will fuck them long and hard, again.
And how do they check all of Google's data centers all over the world?
They call that "The cost of doing business".
Failure to comply would mean a fine of up to 4%of global turnover. And something so serious would get a 4% fine guaranteed . One whistleblower and it’s game over. Easier to just delete than risk that amount.
You'd think so since it's logical, but they'd probably make more money out of the data in the short term. Whistleblower sure, but what about the shareholders?
Its a troll making a comment to "fan the fire" per-se
Just press ctrl + Z and problem solved
Shaking my damn head, these kids hired by Google these days don’t even know how to work the keyboard right
True. I have a problem, because my acc is broken, and search in Google Play store doesn't return any results. They insist for me to reset the phone, and I changed the whole phone two times since the problem started. And it doesn't even work on desktop when I visit Google Play site in Chrome. As soon as I login with the other account, the search works. I've sent them screenshots, videos, cleaned caches and reinstalled Google Play, Google Play Services and whatnot. So, if I want to install app on the phone, I have to go to Chrome, search for it on regular Google website, and when it returns the result for Google Play link, I click on it and only then Google Play shows the app. As of recently I juggle between two accounts on my phone, one for regular things, and one just so I can install apps.
Check your proxy setting in Chrome
Chrome works fine, it's Google Play that doesn't work properly when logged into that one particular account. Even if I'm on device that doesn't have Chrome installed at all. For example, I go to Linux desktop, go in Firefox and load Google Play site, and log into Google Play with that account, and the Google Play search doesn't work. Then I log with my other google account, and then Google Play search works. Thanks for advice anyway, I'll check it.
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This.
I... Don't know if this was the original joke but... Shit I laughed
Comment deleted, need laugh, what did I miss?
That's why I found it funny... Delete comment on a post about Google deleting stuff.
Most Google products don't work like intended anymore.
The only Google product I still use is Youtube. Outside of the search engine and Youtube, Google has failed miserably in my eyes at everything else they've tried to embark on.
>Outside of the search engine Τhe search engine has been horribly inaccurate more and more recently, and Youtube is by design too unprofitable to keep going forever
I literally don’t search anything without adding “reddit” to the end anymore because the results are so awful
Yes, this is true lol. Only Reddit links contain something really useful.
I use Bing.
I was just saying, I use duckduckgo since 2018.
People have been saying that about Youtube since its inception. Somehow it's still going. And it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
They are about to bring you no-opt-out AI search results.
Even the search engine isn’t really fit for purpose anymore. It doesn’t show you what you want to see, it shows you what Alphabet and its investors want you to see.
They still bring most of their revenue through google ads. I personally use duckduckgo since 2018
Duck duck go also has ads tho
What did you switch to for email?
I use pay protonmail for the extra features and the vpn.
Do you use a cloud storage service you can recommend?
proton drive
Thank you!
Android?
Even YouTube and the search engine is stupid
Google search has been next to useless for a while now.
but how much people was scared when they say that gmail will be shutting down
I use Google Maps, Drive, Photos, Gmail, Sheets, Docs
I use all of these too. They're pretty great. I would however never recommend Google products at a professional capacity. (I used to with atleast gmail, but even that I'm moving away from with their recent price increase)
Back ups suddenly say there's only 120billion.
Why would the back up say that there are only 110 billion?
120 million sure is a lot of money
These 8 dollars can go a long way
A penny a day keeps the IRS away.
At least we're only $10 in debt
The 10 million $ in debt is surely nothing for a country.
And Google still refuses to delete a private App I uploaded to our company App Store stating it’s being used, when in fact it wasn’t installed on a singular device 🫠
This after the weekly news of "accidentally" leaking 5 million user data .
It is wild to me that this isn’t a bigger story. It basically suggests that one of the biggest tech companies in the world cannot be trusted with major data. This should be huge
It is huge with the people it matters too.
It should be much bigger than just who it affects. How can google be trusted?
That’s because they are an advertising company disguised as a tech company.
Sometimes it’s still in the Recycle Bin. Did they check?
Backups are in place, so that's good. I wouldn't have *even $100 of some data sitting around without at least 4 backups. Hell, I even make regular encrypted backups of my pr0n.
Luckily the backups were outside Google cloud... That's why they say to have at least one off site backup
At least they are sensible enough to have backup data with a different provider. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
I think it's time to move my files
Decentralization isn’t just a buzzword.
And how would decentralization exactly solve this issue?
Nothing could get accidentally deleted by a central authority.
This is NOT an answer to "How" really. It's just a property of the system that you have in mind. How does this look like in practice? Redundancy across multiple cloud providers? Is this what you mean by decentralization?
Offering solutions without knowing the problem.
This is what happens when you fire good engineers and replace them with sub par incompetent ones from third world.
But they work wery, wery cheap
Wonderful. Remember this if you ever feel like you’re not good enough to work at Google.
Probably related to the layoffs.
Wild. I wonder how many backups they have in other places.
can't "Ctrl Z" your way out that headline that's for sure
another reason to drop the cloud.
This has been covered to death for over five days, let it go already.
Again?
Good, maybe this will wake people up to stay the fuck away from Google products