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UniSuper, on Thursday, began restoring its services after a week-long outage when its superannuation fund's Google cloud was deleted.

UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and global CEO for Google Cloud Thomas Kurian, in a joint statement, apologized to UniSuper members and said it had been "extremely frustrating and disappointing." In addition, Chun, wrote to the 620,000 members, assuring them that outage was not a cyber-attack, and that their personal data had not been compromised, The Guardian reported.

Google Cloud called it a 'one-of-a-kind occurrence misconfiguration' that led to the cloud account being deleted. "This is an isolated, 'one-of-a-kind occurrence' that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud's clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

The outage affected more than half a million UniSuper fund members when they could not access their superannuation accounts. As the services were restored, UniSuper stated that the balances in the account would reflect last week's figures, adding that the accounts would be updated soon. UniSuper manages approximately $125bn in funds.

Financial Standard reported that Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) was monitoring the situation. APRA stated it is "aware of the system outage affecting services and is continuing to monitor the situation".

UniSuper maintains cloud infrastructure in two geographies to guard against outages or loss, but when the fund's cloud subscription was deleted, it impacted both the regions. "However, when the deletion of UniSuper's private cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies," Google Cloud stated.

Since the financial services provider has backups in place with another provider, the loss was minimal and helped faster restoration of its services. "These backups have minimized data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration," said.