UniSuper emailed members at 9.30 pm last Thursday (May 2) that a “service disruption” meant it was off-line but there was no cyber-attack and member data was not exposed. On Friday the fund spelt out that members’ money was safe and the outage was down to IT service provider Google Cloud.
UniSuper assured members they were working on ways to help with requests and had they mentioned Google?
Which is pretty much where things stayed until 9.30pm Monday night (May 6) when UniSuper MD Peter Chun broke cover, emailing members to repeat that accounts are safe, pensions would be paid when due, “the progressive restoration of services” would start on Thursday (May 9) and that Google, “is not the only cloud service provider UniSuper utilises.”
Mr Chun said that initially members would be able to see their fund balances as of April 29, which may indicate when whatever went wrong started (UniSuper customers tell FC they could not access accounts from April 30).
If so, the giant superannuation fund (615,000 members, $124bn under management) will have been off-line for ten days. And yet some social-media grumbling aside, members have been understanding, at least publicly, without demands for head on pikes and full inquiries into what happened.
For now, all members have heard is that ”Google Cloud has confirmed this is an isolated one-of-a-kind issue that has not previously arisen elsewhere (and) they are taking measures to ensure this issue does not happen again.” Good, up to a point.
UniSuper needs to announce when it will explain what happened – blaming Google isn’t enough.
