Google made a gigantic mistake recently. The company accidentally deleted the private Google Cloud account of the $125 billion Australian pension fund UniSuper.
The result: More than half a million members of the UniSuper fund were unable to access their accounts for about a week, The Guardian reported last week. UniSuper had a backup account with another cloud provider, and service was restored on May 2.
“This is an isolated, one-of-a-kind event that has never occurred before for any Google Cloud customer globally,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun said in a joint statement. won by the Guardian. May 8. “This shouldn’t have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to these disruptions and has taken actions to prevent such situations from occurring in the future.”
Although Google says such an error has never happened before in the cloud, the potential for glitches and downtime is a cause for concern for companies and governments that are increasingly handing over their data to cloud software providers. Google Cloud has approx 60% of the 1,000 largest companies in the world and 90% of generative AI unicorns are its customers, the company said this year. AND almost half a million companies around the world employ Google Cloud as a “platform as a service” or customer-facing tool, including Volkswagen and Royal Bank of Canada.
The US government and intelligence communities are increasingly using cloud services to store data. The National Security Agency signed a contract with Amazon worth $10 billion transfer data from intelligence monitoring to the company cloud. The Pentagon has a contract worth $9 billion with Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Amazon for cloud computing services.
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