Google Cloud, $GOOGL, accidentally deleted a $125 billion pension fund’s online account

Google recently made a significant error by accidentally deleting the private Google Cloud account of UniSuper, a $125 billion Australian pension fund.

As a result, more than half a million UniSuper fund members were unable to access their accounts for about a week, The Guardian reported last week. UniSuper had a backup account with another cloud provider, and service was restored on May 2.

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun in a joint statement obtained by The Guardian on May 8. “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.”

Although Google claimed that such a mistake has never happened before on their cloud platform, the potential for glitches and outages remains a concern for companies and governments increasingly relying on cloud software providers. Google Cloud serves about 60% of the world’s 1,000 largest companies and 90% of generative AI unicorns, according to the company. Nearly half a million companies worldwide use Google Cloud as a "platform-as-a-service," including Volkswagen and the Royal Bank of Canada.

The U.S. government and intelligence communities are also using cloud services for data storage. The National Security Agency signed a $10 billion deal with Amazon to move its intelligence surveillance data to the company’s cloud. Additionally, the Pentagon has a $9 billion contract with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon for cloud computing services.