• nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      6 months ago

      And it’s a sad, sad day when the situation in xkcd 908 looks like an improvement over even one of the commercial offerings.

  • pop@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    They’re outsourcing many of their workforce abroad. Like Microsoft, I expect more of these “isolated” accidents to happen.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Company tries to cut costs by outsourcing to another company with lowly paid employees in another country, often India or Pakistan, where the outsourced labour (that all too frequently hasn’t been properly trained in the company’s procedures) often doesn’t share the same first language leading to misunderstandings, made worse by the difference in office hours meaning the teams often can’t communicate with eachother in real time (the timezone factor is a big one IMO).

        It’s an issue affecting a lot of tech companies right now, including where I work (HPE). But I guess it must work out as being cheaper despite the issues, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening.

        • ____@infosec.pub
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          6 months ago

          Interesting point, I am not sure I fully agree.

          I work for a company with operations across the world. Education systems that lead to citizens who are deeply literal and have any shred of critical thinking stamped out of them are a real problem with communications.

          On the US side, I can and have adapted to communicate effectively with those colleagues, but it’s less about English being their third or fourth language, and more about our tendency to speak colloquially, and their tendency to not do so.

          To their credit, if my livelihood was tied to working in a second or third language, I probably would have trouble with non-literal communications in that language as well.

          Different systems, different work cultures, etc. make communication difficult.

          OTOH, we have no opportunity to get to know each other and/or bond over food. Ribs, and something spicy from them, and a bit of time to chat would go a long way to resolving some of those difficulties.

          Now that I think about it, I wonder how we can pull off an intercultural cooking exchange with those colleagues, without sounding like a giant racist when I post it on the internal social site. Seriously could build some bridges.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Better article:

    https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/unisuper_google_cloud_outage_caused/

    They restored from another cloud service. Were I in charge, I’d still be leery of not having that data on my own drives. I have my Windows libraries mapped to my ghetto RAID 0, and those folders are in turn backed to Google. If all else fails, I have a local backup. And this story reminds me, I haven’t installed VEEAM on this new PC…

  • kat_angstrom@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Yeah, this has definitely happened before, we just don’t hear about it in the news. I am personally aware of a Canadian non-profit whose Google accounts were nuked with no notice or explanation last year, leading to massive disruptions for 150 staff and even more clients. They never found out why, and had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      6 months ago

      had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account

      Thus proving that they learned nothing from the experience.

  • LeTak@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Waiting for the news “Google deleted users account, now they lost access to their passkeys and with that to all other services” It can only be a matter of days until it happens.

  • 7rokhym@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Backup was on Azure. I get the sentiment on the cloud, but there is no excuse for this incompetence at Google.

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    “This should not have happened.”

    Duh, ya think?

    Google Sales Engineer: oh I see you didn’t purchase the “Do not randomly nuke my cloud” option… well there’s the problem.

  • markon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    But you can’t trust regular people to have open source ASI, but don’t worry, we won’t fuck it up.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The company accidentally erased the private Google Cloud account of a $125 billion Australian pension fund, UniSuper.

    “This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and UniSuper CEO Peter Chun said in a joint statement obtained by The Guardian May 8.

    Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

    And nearly half a million companies across the globe use Google Cloud as a “platform-as-a-service,” or client-facing tool, including Volkswagen and Royal Bank of Canada.

    The National Security Agency inked a $10 billion deal with Amazon to move its intelligence surveillance data onto the company’s cloud.

    And the Pentagon has a $9 billion contract with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon for cloud computing services.


    The original article contains 272 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • kbin_space_program@kbin.run
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      6 months ago

      It has happened before. They just swept it under the rug and blamed the client.

      A user was setting up a new laptop and synced an empty folder with google drive, intending to download accounts data to their machine. It bugged and treated the empty folder as the master and began erasing the drive contents.

      After two weeks of pestering google, they relented and pulled from their backups they swore they didn’t have and didn’t exist.

    • db2@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      19 billion dollars and they can’t do it themselves? They need Amazon and Microsoft?

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    This is a “one of a kind” error.

    OK, that it can happen at all is a problem. And sorry, but the idiots who put their data in with Google should be fired.

    I get offloading risk, little good will that do when your company goes tits up.

    • slimarev92@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Where would you put their data then? Self hosting is not exactly safe either.

      At the end of the day, every approach has its tradeoffs. Using a reputable cloud provider is a very valid choice.

      • whats_all_this_then@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        Thank you! Every time a story like this comes up, people seem to wanna pretend managing your own hardware is all sunshine and rainbows. Especially if you want global scale or as little down-time as possible, cloud provider’s your best bet, albeit one where you have less control than you would with your own servers.

        Opinion: You should be building on top of open source platforms and tools (Docker, Kubernetes if you need it…granted I’m not an expert in this area) to mitigate some of the vendor-lockin, and take a multi-cloud approach. If you’re mainly hosting on GCP for example, host smaller deployments on AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, or something else as a contingency…eventuality you can also add or just move to your own servers relatively painlessly. Also AGGRESSIVELY backup up your database in multiple places.