UniSuper members worried about superannuation balances as provider outage enters 7th day
James Heath says he could have lost thousands of dollars if he had not moved his shares around days before UniSuper’s outage. (ABC News: Jason Katsaras)
UniSuper customers want answers from the industry super fund manager about whether their balances are safe and how a week-long outage happened.
Some of UniSuper’s 630,000 members say they have had sleepless nights wondering whether they have lost their money put away for retirement as the superannuation company’s outage enters its 7th day.
James Heath is a casual relief teacher from Wangaratta in Victoria and first noticed he could not get into his UniSuper account last Wednesday.
He told the ABC that the past week has left him wondering whether he had any superannuation left in his account.
Mr Heath said he used the interest made by investing his superannuation in promising shares on the stock market to boost his balance and live a more comfortable retirement.
“At the present moment, I’ve been in Asian shares, but usually the stock market drops in May so I got out. But just imagine if I didn’t get out in time and the market has been all over the place. You know, you’d be losing a bit,” he said.
“I think it’s a bit of a disaster.”
Retirees fear losses
Another retiree from Victoria who wanted to remain anonymous because she did not want her finances to be known publicly, told the ABC she and her husband went to withdraw a lump sum from UniSuper to buy a new car, but six days later were still locked out of their account.
“I then went online on Thursday to transfer funds from my super into our account to find that the UniSuper website was down,” she said.
“Today, I still can’t access my money.
“I don’t seem to be able to get anything out of them except they are working on it but can’t give a time line on when I might be able to access my funds.”
A couple in Bendigo who also wanted to remain anonymous said they had lost $150,000 in the 2021–22 stock market crash and were worried they had lost all of their funds to hackers.
Billions held in UniSuper accounts
The industry fund manager holds more than $130 billion in its accounts.
Its online account services, calculators, and application forms have been unavailable to customers during the outage.
Members are reporting they are unable to check their balances, clear deposits and withdrawals, and watch stock markets to maximise their potential and avoid poorly performing shares.
UniSuper said Google Cloud was continuing to investigate what caused the outage but reassured customers the isolated issue was not the result of a malicious attack.
A statement by UniSuper attributed to Google Cloud said a previously unknown bug in the industry super fund’s private cloud service had caused the outage.
Mr Heath from Wangaratta wants to see banks, finance, and e-commerce industries stop relying on cloud-based services to hold account information and run finance systems.
UniSuper says balances are safe
Members have complained UniSuper has been slow and withholding information about how the online outage happened and if their superannuation accounts had been compromised.
UniSuper first responded to customers last Thursday by email, and on Monday said a progressive restoration of services would begin on Thursday, May 9.
“I would like to be very clear on some key points: member accounts are safe, and no data was exposed to unauthorised third parties as a result of this outage,” CEO Peter Chun told members in an email.
“I would also like to reassure members that pension payments have not been disrupted and will continue as per normal.”