Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra
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Critical cloud failure analysis with actionable lessons for GCP users.
Google Cloud accidentally deleted UniSuper's entire subscription, wiping all data across two replicated regions and causing a two-week outage for the $124B Australian superannuation fund. UniSuper avoided total data loss only because they maintained an independent backup with another provider. GCP CEO Thomas Kurian issued an unusually direct admission of fault, but the incident underscores that GCP can delete customer data even with multi-region replication enabled.
Design every GCP workload with an external, provider-independent backup strategy that can survive a full account deletion.
For engineers relying on GCP, this is a concrete example that cloud-native replication alone is not a sufficient disaster recovery strategy — you need to test external backups as a non-negotiable part of your architecture.
A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame. The below is an excerpt from The Pulse #93: OpenAI makes Google dance , originally published on 16 May, 2024. I am republishing it because on 20 May 2026 Google Cloud has done it again: they took offline cloud infra provider Railway by