An Australian pension fund provider experienced a week-long service disruption due to an unprecedented event connected with provisioning by Google Cloud, their cloud service provider (CSP).
This interruption in UniSuper services resulted in members losing online and mobile app access. This was caused by a set of unique problems at Google Cloud, which led to an unintended misconfiguration during the setup of UniSuper’s Private Cloud. This is gauged from an email from Google highlighted in a blog post on UniSuper’s website.
UniSuper supplies financial planning and retirement account services in Australia, and the disruption affected the Australian education and research sectors’ pension fund.
This predicament activated an unknown software bug impacting UniSuper’s systems, resulting in a service disruption that started about a week ago. The restoration process is only set to start on Thursday, as per the post.
On Thursday afternoon, as per Australian time, it will be possible for members to gain access to their accounts. It is important to note that during this phase, the account balances will not reflect the recent updates. Amidst the outage, trading and investment transactions carried on as usual. Importantly, the outage didn’t affect the members’ fund balances.
UniSuper’s top executive, Peter Chun, sent out an email communication to their clients on Wednesday. This email was also made public online. Through this email, he reassured the clientele that their accounts are safe and investments weren’t hampered during the outage. His email read, “The regular investment activities will be mirrored in your balance as soon as our systems are fully functional.” He further assured the clientele that despite the outage, the investment options on the UniSuper website are being updated regularly.
In communication regarding this issue, Google labelled it as a standalone incident. Google also reassured UniSuper clientele that the outage didn’t happen due to any cyber-attack, and hence there wasn’t any unauthorized exposure of clients’ sensitive data.
Google further added that a provisioning problem led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. This caused the deletion of the cloud across two geographies. From these, one was configured to provide a protective shield against outages and loss.
“The restoration of UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has required a significant amount of concentration, effort, and team cooperation to allow for a comprehensive recovery of all primary systems,” the email stated.
UniSuper had also established backups with another service supplier, reducing the impact and assisting the businesses during the recovery operation.
“Google Cloud is deeply sorry for the disruption this has caused, and we remain committed to working tirelessly with UniSuper to completely resolve the issue, aiming to gradually reintroduce services as quickly as feasible,” the email conveyed.
Network disruptions, including cloud, occur, and all major service providers – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, among others – have encountered them at some point. To illustrate, Amazon Web Services faced an incident lasting over two hours in June 2023, which affected several services on the US East Coast. Microsoft Azure also experienced an outage in their data center in Australia in the previous September, which obstructed users’ access to Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform services for over 24 hours.
Issues like these are usually resolved quite rapidly, the extended duration of the UniSuper outage stands as an anomaly, observes Pareekh Jain, Chief Executive Officer of EEIRTrend and Pareekh Consulting. This could potentially damage Google’s reputation and erode customer’s trust in the company’s cloud service provision. “The ongoing UniSuper cloud outage on Google Cloud in Australia is unusually extended, casting a negative light on Google Cloud’s reputation locally,” he remarks.
Jain further discusses how such outages can cause business disruption and data loss for clients. This is often why a majority opts for multi-cloud strategies as a risk management measure. Historically, UniSuper diversified its workload between Azure and two of its own data centres. However, a substantial amount of workload was migrated to the Google Cloud Platform in the preceding year.
