UniSuper outage continues, no cause identified

The super fund plans to begin restoring services later this week, though chief executive Peter Chun has told members the root cause of the outage remains unknown.

UniSuper's systems, including its app, have been down for about a week now, with members unable to access their online accounts. Among other things, they also cannot consolidate their super or make withdrawal requests. The fund also hasn't been able to accept new joiners via its website.

It was confirmed last Friday that the outage is the result of an issue with third-party provider Google Cloud, and the fund had call centre staff work over the weekend to ensure it could still process member requests and answer queries. Those additional resources will remain in place while the restoration efforts are ongoing.

In an update issued last night, Chun said teams are working around the clock to "progressively get our systems back online," but said restoration of services would not commence until Thursday, May 9. During that period, some services will remain limited, he added.

UniSuper expects members will, "in some capacity," be able to log in to online services, access the app, and see their account balances, however these will be as of April 29 and updated following the full restoration.

Chun promised members they will receive daily updates as the restoration progresses, and reinforced again that the outage is not related to a data breach, assuring members their information and retirement savings are safe. He also told members that Google Cloud is not the only cloud service provider used by the fund, saying this has helped minimise the impact of the issue.

Despite having been down for about a week, UniSuper said Google Cloud is still investigating the nature of the incident.

"Let me stress that Google Cloud has provided clear assurance that this was not the result of a malicious act or cyber-attack, and UniSuper data has not been exposed to unauthorised parties because of this issue," Chun said.

"While a full root cause analysis is ongoing, Google Cloud has confirmed this is an isolated, one-of-a-kind issue that has not previously arisen elsewhere."

Despite it being confirmed that the outage was impacting the entire business, UniSuper said the investments team has not been affected and has operated as normal throughout.

Finally, UniSuper affirmed that pension payments have not been impacted by the outage and will continue as normal, with the next payment scheduled for May 15 and due in accounts by May 17.

UniSuper has been criticised by the Finance Sector Union (FSU), which admonished the fund for announcing it would outsource certain functions to Capgemini and then allegedly calling on those same teams to assist with the outage.

Update: Following publication, Google issued the following statement: "The disruption of UniSuper services was caused by a combination of rare issues at Google Cloud 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."

"Google Cloud sincerely apologises for the inconvenience this has caused, and we continue to work around the clock with UniSuper to fully remediate the situation, with the goal of progressively restoring services as soon as possible. We would like to stress again that this was an isolated incident and not the result of a malicious behavior or cyber-attack, and that no UniSuper data has been exposed to unauthorised parties."