Google Cloud issue blamed for UniSuper week-long service disruption

Calling the problem “an isolated incident,” Google also assured UniSuper members that the outage was not due to a cyber-attack and thus their sensitive data was not exposed to unauthorized entities.

What happened?

The provisioning issue caused a deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription, which deleted the cloud in two geographies, one of which was aimed at providing protection against outages and loss, according to Google.

“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,” according to the email.

UniSuper also had backups in place with an additional service provider, which minimized the loss and is helping the companies during the restoration process.

“Google Cloud sincerely apologizes for the inconvenience this has caused, and we continue to work around the clock with UniSuper to fully remediate the situation, with the goal of progressively restoring services as soon as possible,” the email said.

Outages can cause reputational damage

Cloud and other network outages happen, with the major service providers – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and others – all having experienced them at one time or another. For instance, in June 2023, AWS experienced a more than two-hour incident that impacted a number of services on the US East Coast. Microsoft Azure also had a data center outage in Australia in September of last year that prevented users from accessing Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform services for more than 24 hours.