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.

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Google Cloud accidentally deleted the entire cloud subscription of UniSuper, a $124B Australian retirement fund with 615,000 members, wiping out all associated data including replicas across two regions. The fund avoided total data loss only because it maintained a backup with a separate third-party provider. The outage lasted two weeks, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian issued a rare joint statement accepting full blame. The incident is republished as a warning following a 2026 repeat where Google Cloud blocked cloud infrastructure provider Railway's account. The key takeaway: never rely solely on a single cloud provider's replication — always maintain off-platform backups.

Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra