Google accidentally deleted a $125 billion pension fund's account

This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

Our AI golem destroyed something important again, but we’re too big to fail so our mistakes don’t matter.

We promise it won’t happen again, but when it does happen again, it still won’t matter.

We’re a totally safe and responsible company and should be trusted with most of the world’s data management.

AI golem
immediately pictured a living stolen golem roaming the data centre smashing stuff, while google engineers try and reason with it
- That's Elon at Twitter. He was the one yanking cables.
We promise it won’t happen again, but when it does happen again, it still won’t matter.
Rest assured that when it does, we will make every effort to promise once more that it won't happen again.
- That's a big relief
No no no, they're right, it won't happen again.
...but something with a very similar outcome due to a very similar, but not identical, root cause...well, no guarantees I guess.

Sympathies to whoever it was at the pension fund that had to work with Google's "customer service".

I bet the support was like nah thats not possible we're Google. And then they looked into it and their world crashed down around them
- Customer support when you are a paying customer is great.
- If you work customer support at a megacorp, you will be the least surprised person that this happened. I bet the person answered the phone with a mental attitude between "what did we fuck up this time" and "how is this a job or a company that is useful to society".
- Customer support at Google? Most you can get is a chat with a bot that doesn't recognize your account because it has been deleted

Exactly the sort of thing that should NEVER be on a 3rd party system. Ever. Ever ever.

Grumpy old sysadmin. Get offa my lawn!

Devotion to Duty

My wife and I talk about this. We make a mistake and the smackdown comes in a torrent of fines and interest and instant loss of things we need. Corp makes a mistake and oopsie daisy.

I have to imagine there will at least be a lawsuit here. It will probably amount to a rounding error on the size of the fund though.

“Accidentally”

"Deleted"
- That too.
  Wondering if they maybe divested Google, lol.
- "A"
- "Reaped" is the word Google are using.

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,”

I have my electricity billed directly to my bank account, I hadn't noticed that they haven't charged me for months, and last week I received a payment notification for ~900€. I was... Surprised, to say the least.

I think some things should require human intervention.

Why I will not trust autopay.
- There's a phrase you might give useful/insightful.
  "Trust, but verify"
  I use auto pay extensively so that if I forget (ADHD, yay) it still gets paid. But I do (try to) check every month that all the auto pay stuff did trigger properly.
Generally any big bill I want to pay by hand.

Google is effectively IBM at this point, MBAs ruin everything. Another case in point: Boeing
- Slightly disagree. IBM always knew who their core users were. There is a reason why IT people bought their stuff for multiple decades. They would not end of life a product if there were people still using it.

Somehow I'm imagining some lowly overworked, outsourced account reviewer decided to apply the strictest consequence for some minor violation on the account and screw his employer for making his life a living hell and underpaying him.

I think that people will start learning this the hard way about the cloud. Some things are too important to trust to store on someone else's computer.

Man, this fuckup is such a gift to salespeople at AWS, Azure, to anyone selling on-prem solutions, or any kind of redundancy/backup plans.

This is the most Google headline I read in a while

sorry for the question, I'm not a native english speaker... do you mean this as in "this is the Googlest thing ever" or "I have never read so many Google news in a week"?
- first one m8. the second one would require an s - "headlines", although you're right in thinking sometimes that gets dropped too, and then it's just down to context and probability ;)
- The googlest thing ever. Typically English words that are borrowed from French and would take "the most" as a modifier because that's how it's done in French whereas English or other borrowed words take "est". It means the same thing. With words like Google, you could do it either way but as a native speaker the most sounds better with this particular word to me.
  To say the second meaning it would be phrased more like "this is the most Googlest news week" or "this is the most Google news week".

Now I'm wondering if they can recover this from a backup or archive OR if that's going to be an awkward call to their insurance company.

Well, if you bothered reading into the second paragraph, you'd have more info:
UniSuper had a backup account with another cloud provider, and service was restored May 2.
So Google doesn't keep (unpaid) backups for it's clients, and the ones UniSuper paid for were deleted along with everything else.
- Reading an article ! How dare you sir !
Or a panicked call from their insurance company. "You have a backup, right???"
It was restored a week ago. All it did was prevent people from logging into their accounts for a few days.
- Only because they restored from a separate backup with a different provider, not Google restoring a backup.
They're already back online, and they managed to do it without missing a pension payment.
From the article, "UniSuper had a backup account with another cloud provider, and service was restored May 2."

All this does is highlight best practice for data backups. Accidents happen, be prepared.

"accidentally"

What if I told you "the cloud" is just someone else's computer.

Are there actually people out there that think differently than this? This is not a revelation.
- Yes. There are at least two people in the world that believe that it’s magic in the air.
  Edited for plurality.
- Yes
  They are called CEO CIO or CTO
- Yes, I think many people think otherwise, even in tech. To many "the cloud" is some sort of magical, mystical place data can go. And companies selling cloud services perpetuate the myth.
  This is a revelation to many people.

just like i accidently forgot to mail my rent check on time.

And im going, so how much of the pension fund is missing?

why do we allow tech companies to hold money. I feel like thats only going to be a bad idea.

How do you find out that someone didn't actually read the article? Oh, right. Look at the comments.
- in my defense, 90% of articles written these days are 80% filler text, 70% not talking about the fucking thing in the headline, and about 50% AI generated.... So uh.