Mad Max by Google

The Mad Max series is about an Australia where society has collapsed and lawless rules. Did Google nearly herald such anarchy in Oz? 

According to an Ars Technica report, Google Cloud accidentally deleted the account of the $135 billion Australian pension fund, UniSuper, including back-ups! In what is termed as an extremely rare incident of "misconfiguration", 650,000 UniSuper members couldn’t access their retirements accounts for a week.

“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.” 

Further, while Google typically has duplications in different geographies to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because UniSuper's cloud subscription itself was deleted, it caused the deletion of all backups as well! Great! So, an unsubscribe button nearly wiped clean the retirement accounts of 2% of Australia's population.

Fortunately, UniSuper was able to eventually restore services because the fund had backups in place with another provider. As the proverb goes...don't put all your eggs in one hyperscaler basket!