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.
Happened all the time over on r/androiddev. Small company brings on the wrong person/uses the wrong SDK/wrongfully fails an review and their account is then banned via “association”, which then propagates down to countless other employees. Only way out is to hope and pray that a human sees the appeal or try and blow up online
Happened so often in fact that the subreddit even created several guides on how to avoid it. My favourite part is that even unpublished apps must be updated in perpetuity to abide by Google’s ever changing requirements
Or this other occasion where viewers of one of the most popular YouTubers in the world were banned for typing in chat
Google Cloud counts about 60% of the world’s 1,000 biggest companies and 90% of generative AI unicorns as its customers
What exactly are generative AI unicorns?
I believe in this context unicorn refers to start-ups that are valued at at least a billion dollars (or some number, I forget). So basically AI start-ups.
Makes sense, thank you
I started out a field tech for an industrial firm. My industrial job killed my body. 110+ degrees in the factories, heavy chemicals back when safety was a joke, impossible hours and crawling thru hell on earth to trace a control problem.
Decades later I ended up a CTO. The more I worked, the more I realized it was impossible. Everything was impossible. It could never be secure enough. I could never have enough faith in my vendors to sleep at night. Everything in every direction was terrifying, and we were good at it. You just couldn’t be good enough.
I wished I had stayed a field rat. That CTO job broke my mind. Now I’m that nutjob that won’t let people use my WiFi, they go on the visitor walled off WiFi. My kids can’t install apps without permission. I check my home network logs and have alerts set up for everything imaginable.
I read stories like this and it gives me PTSD.
They’re outsourcing many of their workforce abroad. Like Microsoft, I expect more of these “isolated” accidents to happen.
Wait, what does this have to do with outsourcing abroad?
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.
Let the people who installed/created it maintain it or let a bunch of new folk do it, which is likely to work best?
The abroad part isn’t the issue. We’re a global village with the Internet now, after all. It’s the outsourcing part that’s the issue.
Whoopsie my bad guys
Critical support
Backup was on Azure. I get the sentiment on the cloud, but there is no excuse for this incompetence at Google.
But you can’t trust regular people to have open source ASI, but don’t worry, we won’t fuck it up.
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!
19 billion dollars and they can’t do it themselves? They need Amazon and Microsoft?
Much cheaper to have an external company do these things sometimes
It also lets you pass the buck in case of issues from a manager’s perspective.
Good way to pay your informants.
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.
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…
Oopsies lol
Whoopsie!
Did they mistake it for one of their own services people were using?
Does this mean we can put that account on https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
yes
We need to have something like reddit gold. but the money goes to a charity of your choice, and whoever you golded gets a badge next to their comment. I’d do that to this if I could.
But how would a capitalist benefit from that?
Sigh. That is the world we live in.
Just give a Lemmy Lemon 🍋 and donate to the charity of your choice.
Or we could just add the Yeah button from the Miiverse
😂
Fucking gold!
The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
And it’s a sad, sad day when the situation in xkcd 908 looks like an improvement over even one of the commercial offerings.
Is there anyone here who’s worked as an engineer for Google, by chance? I’d honestly like to know about their work culture and how they would deal with stuff like this internally. Like, are the line managers understanding, or are they just screaming at their employees if shit hits the fan?
