UniSuper blames continued outage on Google Cloud
For the past 5 days UniSuper has been inaccessible by members, unable to check their Super balances and use the platform as a whole.
UniSuper has been experiencing an outage since the 2nd of May 2024. In a recent outage update sent to members, UniSuper has passed the blame of the outage onto its cloud provider, Google Cloud.
Update: The outage was due to Google Cloud "Deleting" UniSuper's account with the platform. Luckily, disaster recovery backups were with another cloud provider so the restore could be carried out. Accounts are progressively coming back online as of 10th May 2024 and users are able to login to check their balances.
The disruption of UniSuper services was caused by a combination of rare issues at Google Cloud that resulted in an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud, which triggered a previously unknown software bug that impacted UniSuper’s systems. This was an unprecedented occurrence, and measures have been taken to ensure this issue does not happen again.
There seems to be no in depth explanation or reasoning on what went wrong at this time. With a downtime of over 5 days and counting, which is statistically high for a financial institution, one could speculate something has gone terribly wrong.
UniSuper had moved 60% of their workloads to Google Cloud in June 2023, this was done by external consultancy Kasna, which is apart of the Mantel Group. Following this migration roles in its Delivery and Information Business Unit were outsourced.
UniSuper aims for "the progressive restoration of member services" starting Thursday, 9 May 2024.
You can read UniSuper's full statement here.
