alt Hacker News... not quite. I worked directly with the folks involved on getting more RCA details public. This customer used a single product on GCP, a specific type of VMware hosting, and the "subscription" to that product failed, which turned those resources off. It's more like turning off all their VM's, rather than deleting their entire account, identities, access structures, etc.
The reporting on that was a bid muddy with Google and Unisuper officially saying different things in different places. Regardless, calling it "more like turning off all their VM's" sounds like heavily downplaying the reality. The downtime alone confirms it was way more than that.
From their joint statement [0]:
> when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies.
> an extensive recovery of our Private Cloud which includes hundreds of virtual machines, databases and applications.
> UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss
Strangely enough on this last point a Google blog post [1] says:
> This incident did not impact: The customer’s data backups stored in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) in the same region.
[0] https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...