Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google’s end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.
UniSuper’s mistake was relying too much on Google Cloud even for critical backups.
I think about how many times things like this happen to individuals that don’t have the weight to warrant an article where their entire collection of online data just gets wiped out and Google responds with: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don’t trust your data to the cloud, folks.
My thought exactly. I read the headline and thought that this probably happens to people fairly often, I can’t believe Google admitted to this… Oh wait there it is - that’s why. I have an old Google apps for your domain account. They switched it to an “apps for work account” then they switched it to “apps for business”. Then switched it to “G suite”. They then switched it to “Google workspace”. Each time they made changes in the infrastructure and that account is all whacked up. There’s lots of things including Google made things that just don’t work with it and features are late to arrive or never do when standard Google accounts are changed. I’m amazed they haven’t just accidentally deleted all my stuff in one of these change overs.
I also have one of these old Google apps accounts. I wish they would accidentally delete it so I could get the last couple stragglers off and take my domain elsewhere.