Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra
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Critical cloud failure analysis with actionable lessons for GCP users.
Google Cloud accidentally deleted UniSuper's entire subscription, wiping all data across two replicated regions and causing a two-week outage for the $124B Australian superannuation fund. UniSuper avoided total data loss only because they maintained an independent backup with another provider. GCP CEO Thomas Kurian issued an unusually direct admission of fault, but the incident underscores that GCP can delete customer data even with multi-region replication enabled.
- Design every GCP workload with an external, provider-independent backup strategy that can survive a full account deletion.
For engineers relying on GCP, this is a concrete example that cloud-native replication alone is not a sufficient disaster recovery strategy — you need to test external backups as a non-negotiable part of your architecture.