UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don’t allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider. A June 2023 press release touted UniSuper’s big cloud migration to Google, with Sam Cooper, UniSuper’s Head of Architecture, saying, “With Google Cloud VMware Engine, migrating to the cloud is streamlined and extremely easy. It’s all about efficiencies that help us deliver highly competitive fees for our members.”

Source: Unprecedented Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups