Google Accidentally Deleted $125 Billion Pension Fund's Account
Google Accidentally Deleted $125 Billion Pension Fund's Account
About half a million customers of the Australian fund UniSuper were locked out of their accounts for a week
Did they mistake it for one of their own services people were using?
We need to have something like reddit gold. but the money goes to a charity of your choice, and whoever you golded gets a badge next to their comment. I'd do that to this if I could.
Does this mean we can put that account on https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
yes
Man nice site
Fucking gold!
😂
The cloud is just someone else's computer.
And it's a sad, sad day when the situation in xkcd 908 looks like an improvement over even one of the commercial offerings.
They're outsourcing many of their workforce abroad. Like Microsoft, I expect more of these "isolated" accidents to happen.
Wait, what does this have to do with outsourcing abroad?
Company tries to cut costs by outsourcing to another company with lowly paid employees in another country, often India or Pakistan, where the outsourced labour (that all too frequently hasn't been properly trained in the company's procedures) often doesn't share the same first language leading to misunderstandings, made worse by the difference in office hours meaning the teams often can't communicate with eachother in real time (the timezone factor is a big one IMO).
It's an issue affecting a lot of tech companies right now, including where I work (HPE). But I guess it must work out as being cheaper despite the issues, otherwise it wouldn't be happening.
Better article:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/unisuper_google_cloud_outage_caused/
They restored from another cloud service. Were I in charge, I'd still be leery of not having that data on my own drives. I have my Windows libraries mapped to my ghetto RAID 0, and those folders are in turn backed to Google. If all else fails, I have a local backup. And this story reminds me, I haven't installed VEEAM on this new PC...
Yeah, this has definitely happened before, we just don't hear about it in the news. I am personally aware of a Canadian non-profit whose Google accounts were nuked with no notice or explanation last year, leading to massive disruptions for 150 staff and even more clients. They never found out why, and had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account
had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account
Thus proving that they learned nothing from the experience.
Waiting for the news “Google deleted users account, now they lost access to their passkeys and with that to all other services” It can only be a matter of days until it happens.
Happened all the time over on r/androiddev. Small company brings on the wrong person/uses the wrong SDK/wrongfully fails an review and their account is then banned via "association", which then propagates down to countless other employees. Only way out is to hope and pray that a human sees the appeal or try and blow up online
Happened so often in fact that the subreddit even created several guides on how to avoid it. My favourite part is that even unpublished apps must be updated in perpetuity to abide by Google's ever changing requirements
Or this other occasion where viewers of one of the most popular YouTubers in the world were banned for typing in chat
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Backup was on Azure. I get the sentiment on the cloud, but there is no excuse for this incompetence at Google.
Meh. Not all Indians lol
“This should not have happened.”
Duh, ya think?
Google Sales Engineer: oh I see you didn’t purchase the “Do not randomly nuke my cloud” option.. well there’s the problem.
But you can't trust regular people to have open source ASI, but don't worry, we won't fuck it up.
I started out a field tech for an industrial firm. My industrial job killed my body. 110+ degrees in the factories, heavy chemicals back when safety was a joke, impossible hours and crawling thru hell on earth to trace a control problem.
Decades later I ended up a CTO. The more I worked, the more I realized it was impossible. Everything was impossible. It could never be secure enough. I could never have enough faith in my vendors to sleep at night. Everything in every direction was terrifying, and we were good at it. You just couldn’t be good enough.
I wished I had stayed a field rat. That CTO job broke my mind. Now I’m that nutjob that won’t let people use my WiFi, they go on the visitor walled off WiFi. My kids can’t install apps without permission. I check my home network logs and have alerts set up for everything imaginable.
I read stories like this and it gives me PTSD.
Oopsies lol
Whoopsie!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company accidentally erased the private Google Cloud account of a $125 billion Australian pension fund, UniSuper.
“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun said in a joint statement obtained by The Guardian May 8.
Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”
And nearly half a million companies across the globe use Google Cloud as a “platform-as-a-service,” or client-facing tool, including Volkswagen and Royal Bank of Canada.
The National Security Agency inked a $10 billion deal with Amazon to move its intelligence surveillance data onto the company’s cloud.
And the Pentagon has a $9 billion contract with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon for cloud computing services.
The original article contains 272 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It has happened before. They just swept it under the rug and blamed the client.
A user was setting up a new laptop and synced an empty folder with google drive, intending to download accounts data to their machine. It bugged and treated the empty folder as the master and began erasing the drive contents.
After two weeks of pestering google, they relented and pulled from their backups they swore they didn't have and didn't exist.
Whoopsie my bad guys
This is a "one of a kind" error.
OK, that it can happen at all is a problem. And sorry, but the idiots who put their data in with Google should be fired.
I get offloading risk, little good will that do when your company goes tits up.
Where would you put their data then? Self hosting is not exactly safe either.
At the end of the day, every approach has its tradeoffs. Using a reputable cloud provider is a very valid choice.
Thank you! Every time a story like this comes up, people seem to wanna pretend managing your own hardware is all sunshine and rainbows. Especially if you want global scale or as little down-time as possible, cloud provider's your best bet, albeit one where you have less control than you would with your own servers.
Opinion: You should be building on top of open source platforms and tools (Docker, Kubernetes if you need it...granted I'm not an expert in this area) to mitigate some of the vendor-lockin, and take a multi-cloud approach. If you're mainly hosting on GCP for example, host smaller deployments on AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, or something else as a contingency...eventuality you can also add or just move to your own servers relatively painlessly. Also AGGRESSIVELY backup up your database in multiple places.
Suddenly, using what little 401k I had for a down payment on a house doesn’t seem so bad lol
Yup. I try to keep my money in cash or in the bank. Crypto is alright but it's become a huge issue when guys who have no life skills outside hacking feel the need to assert power over others lives
Is this the same one as a few days ago, or a second?
Same one about the retirement fund operator from Australia.
Is there anyone here who's worked as an engineer for Google, by chance? I'd honestly like to know about their work culture and how they would deal with stuff like this internally. Like, are the line managers understanding, or are they just screaming at their employees if shit hits the fan?
Google Cloud counts about 60% of the world’s 1,000 biggest companies and 90% of generative AI unicorns as its customers
What exactly are generative AI unicorns?
I believe in this context unicorn refers to start-ups that are valued at at least a billion dollars (or some number, I forget). So basically AI start-ups.
Makes sense, thank you
Critical support
These software guys literally get paid on salary and even get time to spare, the need to fear monger and threaten to destroy people's livelihoods when you run a huge portion of internet services just shows that they're not exactly the type to "do no evil"
Read it again, they never removed it. It moved to the end.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/254019/
Accidentally deleted...or hacked?
If this happens to you, then you only have yourself to blame. Do not use evil corps.
