No repair timeline for UniSuper outage caused by Google Cloud ‘issues, misconfiguration’

Google Cloud has provided some detail on what caused the major outage that has locked UniSuper members out of their accounts for the past week.

UniSuper members are currently unable to access their super accounts.

A UniSuper outage that has locked members out of their accounts for days, with no firm timeline for when they will regain access, was caused by “an inadvertent misconfiguration” by Google Cloud which, in turn, triggered a software bug that crashed the super fund giant’s system.

The $125bn fund is still unable to tell its more than 600,000 members when they will be able to access their accounts, saying only that the “progressive restoration” of member services will begin on Thursday.

A Google spokes man said the disruption of services was caused by “a combination of rare issues” 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 secondary systems”.

“This was an unprecedented occurrence, and measures have been taken to ensure this issue does not happen again,” the spokesman said. Google is working with UniSuper to get the systems back online but the spokesman for the tech giant was again unable to provide any definite timelines, saying only that it had a “goal of progressively restoring services as soon as ­possible”.

The system crash was not the result of a malicious act or cyber-attack and no UniSuper data had been exposed to unauthorised parties, Google and UniSuper said.

But the outage still leaves members unable to access their funds, switch their investments or make withdrawal requests. Pension payments had not been disrupted and were continuing as normal, UniSuper confirmed.

“Services that we expect to have online in some capacity will include the ability to login to online services, access Mobile App, and see balances,” UniSuper said of the progressive restoration due to begin on Thursday.

But even this access will be limited: members will only be able to view balances as they were at April 29.