Google Cloud accidentally deletes a financial institution account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ ( www.theguardian.com )

A week of downtime and all the servers were recovered only because the customer had a proper disaster recovery protocol and held backups somewhere else, otherwise Google deleted the backups too

Google cloud ceo says "it won't happen anymore", it's insane that there's the possibility of "instant delete everything"

poo ,
@poo@lemmy.world avatar

And this is why I back up Google Drive locally every night.

ksynwa ,
@ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Can I see this unprecedented misconfiguration?

Google: No

ID411 ,

Only a week.

MossyFeathers ,

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

Bullshit. I've heard of people having their Google accounts randomly banned or even deleted before. Remember when the Terraria devs cancelled the Stadia port of Terraria because Google randomly banned their account and then took weeks to acknowledge it? The only reason why Google responded so quickly to this is because the super fund manages over $100b and could sue the absolute fuck out of Google.

Pechente ,

This happened to me years ago. Suddenly got a random community guidelines violation on YouTube for a 3 second VFX shot that was not pornographic or violent and that I owned all the rights to. After that my whole Google account was locked down. I never found out what triggered this response and I could never resolve the issue with them since I only ever got automated responses. Fuck Google.

harry315 ,

Remember people: The cloud is just someone else's computer.

breakingcups ,

Welp, this is the most left field KilledByGoogle entry yet.

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Tbh I do not understand why would a company keep their data on a service like Google Cloud

Vendetta9076 ,
@Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works avatar

My company used to do this. Its cause we were incredibly stupid.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@fedia.io avatar

Money. It's a lot cheaper to let somebody else maintain your systems than to pay somebody to create and maintain your own, directly.

Aurenkin ,

Flexibility is a huge one too. Much easier to upscale / downscale.

GolfNovemberUniform , (edited )
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

No I meant that Google Cloud is very invasive. Why not to use a more ethical provider?

allywilson ,

Why do you think it's invasive? How do you quantify which providers are less invasive?

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Google is one of the most privacy invasive companies in the world. And judging by encryption standards, terms of service and privacy policies

settoloki ,

Are you sure you've not just read bad stuff without verification on the internet and feel the need to chime in on something you don't fully understand?

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes. I read Google's policies many times.

settoloki ,

Me too as a programmer that uses Google cloud to store government information. Which bit of the policy says they are going to access your data, shouldn't take you long to link it to me if you read them as much as you say. Unless what you're actually doing is spreading misinformation and bullshit.

ReversalHatchery ,

I'm not the one who you were responding to, but considering google's history, I don't believe anything they claim, because they have lied so many times in the past, and because every "privacy guarantee" they provide is practically unprovable. It's nothing more than wishful thinking to think that google does nothing with government data stored with them, with google classroom data of millions of children, and others. They have shown that they can't be trusted.

pupbiru ,
@pupbiru@aussie.zone avatar

b2b and audited security standards are a whole different thing - you deal with finance and health you’ve gotta prove to a 3rd party over and over that you have controls and technology in place to make sure you aren’t lying

this isn’t consumer BS

settoloki ,

If they lied about this and are accessing very confidential information I think my company would sue the giblets off Google.

You need to remember we are talking about Google Cloud, the enterprise services they offer and not Gmail and search engines.

pupbiru ,
@pupbiru@aussie.zone avatar

and you know the security standards that are achievable on google cloud entirely negate your point right? their cloud offering is a totally different beast

KarnaSubarna ,
@KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml avatar

Money and Time – It's rather easier/cheaper for Organizations nowadays to outsource a part of infra to Cloud service providers.

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

I meant Google Cloud, not cloud outsourcing itself

RegalPotoo ,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

Because accountants mostly.

For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

  • OPEX: "operational expenditure" - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don't get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
  • CAPEX: "capital expenditure" - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being "worth" whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being "worthless" in 5 years. Departments typically don't have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Excellent explanation, however, technically it does not constitute an "odd spot." Rather, it represents a "100% acceptable and evident position" as it brings benefits to all stakeholders, from accounting to the CEO. Moreover, it is noteworthy that investing in services or leasing arrangements increases expenditure, resulting in reduced tax liabilities due to lower reported profits. Compounding this, the prevailing high turnover rate among CEOs diminishes incentives for making significant long-term investments.

In certain instances, there is also plain corruption. This occurs when a supplier offering services such as computer and server leasing or software, as well as company car rentals, is owned by a friend or family member of a C-level executive.

Kit ,

G Suite is a legitimate option for small-medium businesses. It's seen as the cheaper, simpler option versus Azure. I usually recommend it for nonprofits as they have a decent free option for 501c3 orgs.

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline.

Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”.

“These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” the pair said.

“Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems.

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