- Google Cloud accidentally deleted UniSuper’s account and backups, causing a major data loss and downtime for the company.
- UniSuper was able to recover data from backups with a different provider after the incident.
- The incident highlighted the importance of having safeguards in place for cloud service providers to prevent such catastrophic events from occurring.
As the saying goes: if you only have one backup you have zero backups.
How the fuck does Google of all companies manage to accidentally delete that‽
I’m betting job cuts and someone was in a hurry
Backups all tied to the same Google account that got mistakenly terminated, and automation did the rest?
It didn’t matter that they might have had backups on different services, since it was all centralised through Google, it was all blown away simultaneously.
It’s weird that backups got deleted immediately. I would imagine they get marked for deletion but really deleted something like a month later to prevent this kind of issue.
That’s when accounts are closed or payments missed, I think in this case they just deleted the sub itself which just bypassed everything for instant deletion.
I don’t see why it matters that it was a subscription. Anything which deletes data should be a soft delete.
Sometimes it has to be a hard delete to comply with a user’s request to remove data.
Everything is tied to the subscriptions, they deleted the sub and that automatically deleted all backups.
That sounds like a pretty trashy backup scheme. I don’t care what your subscription status is I’m keeping those backups until retension’s over.
Very stupid.
AWS has a holding period after account deletion where nothing is actually deleted, just inaccessible and access can be regained without data loss.
Since first hearing about this I’m wondering how TF Google Cloud doesn’t have a similar SOP.