Cloud disasters: Musey deletes their own company!
In this episode, we uncover the little-known but cautionary tale of Musey, a startup building an interior design app that catastrophically lost everything when an admin accidentally deleted their entire Google Workspace account.
We dive deep into:
- How a single slip-up by an admin led to over $1.5 million of intellectual property stored in Google Drive getting instantly wiped out
- Musey's desperate attempts to get their data back by contacting Google and even filing a lawsuit
- How not even the cloud giants like Google have an obligation to restore customer data lost due to error or malfeasance
- Why you absolutley need independent backups of cloud data instead of blindly trusting sync and retention policies
The devastating story of Musey serves as a sobering reminder that human error can still trump even the most resilient cloud platforms. Don’t miss this rare peek behind the curtain at a colossal cloud failure that very few people know about.
00:00 - Musey
24:29 -
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Several years ago, a small startup placed all their eggs in the Google
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drive basket, and then proceeded to set that basket on fire.
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With one fatal click by an admin over a million dollars.
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Went up in smoke.
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Today we investigate the tragic tale of Musey, a promising young
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company building an innovative app who lost everything when their Google
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account was wiped out instantly.
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This is our second in a series called cloud disasters.
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Organizations that thought their data in the cloud was protected.
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Only to find out it wasn't, it was too late for them, but not for you.
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Hi, I'm w Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
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Backup.
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And my goal with this podcast is to make sure that something
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like that never happens to you.
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This is the backup wrap up.
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W. Curtis Preston: Welcome to the show.
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I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, and I have with me Persona Ana.
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I'm doing well, Curtis.
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We're talking about this concept of.
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Things that people think don't need to be backed up.
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And they definitely need to be backed up.
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And we're zooming in and doing a, a deep dive into each of the
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stories that we often talk about when we reference this, right?
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So these are, uh, typically cloud systems, you know, cloud services that people
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thought that were backed up and then.
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Uh, when they accidentally screwed something up, they
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found out they weren't
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They were relying on it for their business and for their
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livelihood and bad things happen.
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W. Curtis Preston: And sometimes, many times those things are like attacks.
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Uh, you know, you know, things like that.
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In this case though, this, uh, one is, you know, it's a reminder that.
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We spent a lot of time on the podcast, talking especially lately
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about cyber attacks and things like that and ransomware, and
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we don't talk that much about equipment failure because typically, uh, you
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know, thanks to the advent of raid and erasure coding and things like that.
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Generally, that's not the reason people restore data.
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The interesting thing about this story, it that I, one interesting thing that
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I found out, or that I noticed was that it was only covered by the register.
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So, uh, thanks to the folks over there.
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I, I don't even know.
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How they, uh, you know, found it, somebody sent it to them
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and then nobody else covered it.
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Which is interesting 'cause I looked around, I couldn't
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find any coverage of it.
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So this is about a company called Musi, which also I found
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out, goes by the name of Moss, M-O-S-S-S.
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They do have a Facebook page.
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That you can find.
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But They were a company that was building an interior design app that would be
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used by influencers, home decorators and other folks to sort of showcase
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what you see on the inside of a house.
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And, um, basically somehow someone went and deleted their entire G
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Suite account for the entire company.
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Which contained all of their data.
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And from what I could tell, they weren't doing backups.
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And that's kind of where things start now.
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They try to get the data back, and I think we'll talk about that in a
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little bit about what they did to try to get their data back from Google.
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But yeah, like Curtis says, it's not a happy ending.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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It appears that it was their admin, right?
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The idea that I remember hearing was that they were trying to delete a test account.
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I.
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But instead of deleting a test account, they deleted the production account.
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And we need to be very specific here.
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They didn't delete a user, right?
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You know, in, in Google Drive or Google Workspace, you could have
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users underneath your account.
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They deleted The entire account
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The organization's account.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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The, yeah, the, the entire organization, right.
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According to their court filing.
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They did immediately contact Google and say, Hey, this thing happened.
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And I'm gonna say, sadly, the Google, uh, support rep said,
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I'll get right on it, rather than
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saying, yeah, you're screwed.
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Not my problem.
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W. Curtis Preston: yeah, not my problem.
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Yeah, you're screwed.
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You should have backed that up.
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Uh, where's your backups?
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Uh, what the, uh, the Google person allegedly said was, we'll get right on it.
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Meanwhile, they're out there desperately trying to reach someone at Google for
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multiple days, even multiple weeks.
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Meanwhile, they're not able to contact, their customers are not able to, you know,
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access any of their intellectual property.
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So apparently they had built.
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This entire app, uh, and everything was stored in G Drive and apparently they
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weren't, uh, you know, I'm just saying based on what happened, it does not
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appear that they were synchronizing.
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'cause you could synchronize, uh, Google Drive down to your, uh, you know, desktop.
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And if they had deleted the account up there, the desktop copy
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probably would have, uh, remained.
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But they didn't do that because once they had deleted the, um, you know, this.
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The, the cloud version of it, they had nothing.
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Right?
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So they had nothing in their, of their intellectual property that they
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had built, uh, that they had spent a million and a half dollars on, right?
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That, that was in, in the court filings, that they had spent a million and a
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half dollars on this company so far.
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And they also mentioned that they weren't able to contact their customers,
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they weren't able to do business.
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And there is, uh, they said a few weeks later.
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I feel like saying
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a few moments later.
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I now have that in your head, don't I?
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W. Curtis Preston: it's your fault.
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Um, go Google did get back to them and say, uh, they can't get their data back.
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I think the weirdest part of the story that you might want to talk about is this.
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They're saying that
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someone at Google, and I don't see any evidence of this, but they're
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saying, someone at Google said something along the lines of, maybe you
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could get the data back with a court
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filing.
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Did you see
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anything about that?
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I didn't see anything in the articles about
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that, but that's just weird.
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the Only time I could see that happening is potentially if they
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had kept some of that data because of legal hold or some legal reason.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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Or if for some reason they had a copy somewhere else,
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like I could imagine in the case of doing like a disaster recovery copy,
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maybe they had that copy somewhere else and you can get the data back.
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Right.
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It's not their obligation.
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It's like a best effort.
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I.
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W. Curtis Preston: Right.
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I agree with both scenarios.
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I like that first one.
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The second one, you know, we talk a lot about how many of these service
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providers, they do have a backup, as I met quotes in the air of like the
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entire data center that they can use.
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To bring the data center back if they screw it up.
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Right.
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Um, but the, it's not built for you.
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I give an example of Microsoft 365 says that they have a delayed copy of
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exchange, uh, that can be used if they screw up the entire exchange environment.
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But when I asked them directly as a Microsoft 365 customer,
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can I use that delayed copy of exchange to restore my environment?
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And they just said, no.
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Right.
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So maybe that's a scenario where somebody might have been alluding to it.
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I don't know if that person was, uh, you know, um,
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and,
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W. Curtis Preston: talking outta school.
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Right.
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Um.
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and also just along that, like if they were a billion dollar
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company, I'm sure that it would've been a different result or Google may have
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been more willing to jump in and help versus a smaller company like this.
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W. Curtis Preston: yeah,
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I'm not sure if the result would've been different.
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I think maybe the activities along the way would've been the same.
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Um, but the, the, the re by the way, the, where we get this, uh, this
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comment about the subpoena or civil request was that was in their lawsuit.
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And, and I have to say, I feel for these guys, uh, of what happened to them.
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Because when I look at the filing, like you really have to see it to, like, you
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have to literally lay your eyes on and we'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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And what you see is a good portion of it is typed up and sort of like normal.
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And then there's all these like handwritten notes all over it.
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Like at the very beginning there's this like star.
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And it says, serving a civil request to have access to our data
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restored or provided as outlined a document for serving civil subpoenas
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and civil requests given to us.
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Emailed it says by Google.
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Um, IE Google sent us instructions to get our data back.
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Um, you know, and then.
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They just sort of lay out this story in this lawsuit, which they say in the
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lawsuit, we're not suing to get money.
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We're suing to get our data back.
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They basically believed that Google had a copy of their data and Google, you know,
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clearly did not have a copy of their data.
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Yeah, and just looking at the filing, I
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don't think a lawyer wrote that,
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W. Curtis Preston: No.
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Oh yeah.
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Thanks for bringing that up.
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It is actually listed as a per se lawsuit,
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which means that they filed
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it themselves.
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Yeah.
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And just like, yeah, with the handwriting and everything else, you could tell
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that it was an individual who was not an attorney writing and typing.
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And I know that would, like you mentioned Curtis, they wanted their data back and
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they were mentioning sort of what type of data they had stored in Google Drive.
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Right?
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It was, uh, their ip, ui, ux, mockups, user research.
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And a whole bunch of other things, algorithm decisions, how they built it.
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But the other thing is they were like, yeah, in our emails, we also had medical
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records about someone's nephew who was going undergoing some treatment
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and they needed access to their emails
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W. Curtis Preston: Right.
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That was the weirdest part, I think was just reading that they had intermixed.
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I, you know what?
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I don't know.
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That just made no, that part made no sense to me.
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Like it's not like they stored, it's not like this was the only copy of their.
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Their nephew's medical records, like it was their only copy of
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the nephew's medical records.
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I, I thought that was very odd.
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But the thing in the filing is that this was a filing in the federal.
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US District Court for the Northern District of California, by the way, this
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was in, um, the Bay Area and they, um, and so you have to give reason why the
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federal court would be the jurisdiction, and they listed multiple reasons for that.
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Um, but.
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What we do know from the dockets, I was able to find that the lawsuit
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was withdrawn, basically just
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under two weeks later,
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yeah.
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That's suspicious.
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Yeah.
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Well, I think one thing we should also mention is this
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happened in what year, Curtis?
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W. Curtis Preston: uh, 2019.
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Okay.
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Yeah, so this was a while ago.
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The interesting thing, and this is all just this is all just,
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, we're hypothesizing, but I did my best to
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try to find out, uh, everything I could, but this is our best effort
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to, to figure out what happened.
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yeah.
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And I think what, like just given the timeframes, and it was two weeks
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later after it was filed, either they.
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Decided, or they maybe got legal counsel and talked to someone, they
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were like, yeah, you're screwed.
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Based on Google's response.
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Or Google might have come after them and been like, Hey, if you really
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wanna go through this, you're going to fail and then you're gonna have to
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pay all our court fees, attorney fees,
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W. Curtis Preston: Right,
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in which case that would be like, I could, I can't even
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imagine a Google attorney and how much that would cost because it would be
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external counsel and everything else.
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So they probably were like, yeah, it's not worth it.
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Or maybe they talked to someone on Google who said, look.
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We understand this is tough luck, but this is what it is.
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And so maybe they had some sense knocked into them and they were like, yeah, this
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doesn't make sense to move forward with.
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It sucks, I feel for them, but there isn't much that Google
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could really do at that point.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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What was another sort of interesting thing about the story?
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I, I just, I'm not sure why the dates don't line up.
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In the filing, uh, the, the lawsuit filing, they said that the deletion
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happened on June 8th, 2019.
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The domain went up for sale on June 6th, 2019.
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Mm.
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W. Curtis Preston: The reason why I say that is, uh, the internet
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archive found that right, the, the latest update for the website.
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Uh, from June from 2019 was that it went, for se it said, domain available
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for purchase, uh, June 6th, 2019, which would suggest that the deletion
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happened on June 5th or June 6th.
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But, um, I, I
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thought that was to a little bit strange.
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I don't mean to throw shade at the company, but it could also
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be possible that the company just realized it's not feasible, what they're trying
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to do in the timeframes they're given and ran outta cash and we're like, yeah.
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, the one interesting thing is the fact that they're completely gone from the web.
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Right.
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There's no trace of 'em on the internet anywhere.
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Right.
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It's just really weird.
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Like you can always find traces of a company that's gone bust somewhere.
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W. Curtis Preston: Right.
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yeah.
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like you mentioned, the Register is the
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only company that held this
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article.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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And, and that, that's why what I was using the internet, uh,
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archive for and, uh, the mu app.com was the, was the website and it.
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Like I said, it, it showed that it went up for purchase and then it
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stayed that, that same way, uh, for another, uh, like a year and a half.
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And then it got bought by a Japanese anime artist, which is a really weird
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domain for a Japanese anime artist.
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But, uh, in 2021.
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And the, the co-founder that was just, that was mentioned in the
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article, uh, left the company a few months later, um, about.
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I, I think they might have tried to make a go of it with what was in
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their, you know, memory or something.
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Tried to bring the, the, you know, again, that's just pure conjecture,
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but the, the company ceased to exist, uh, in, essentially in 2020.
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It's a sad, sad story from a single mistake of an admin, an entire company
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goes bust because they didn't have a backup of their, uh, cloud data.
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Yep.
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that's scary, right?
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When you think about
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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Because it's not just the company, right?
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It's all the time and effort all the employees put in, right?
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All the customers who were hoping and buying products based on
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what they were promised, right?
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All of the things that they wanted, it's all like, poof.
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Gone.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, yeah.
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And all the, all those poor employees that were hoping probably for some,
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uh, IPO, you know, payout or some kind of acquisition or whatever.
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Obviously all that goes by.
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Um, so when we think about this, what kind of
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thoughts come to your mind?
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Well, the first, of course, and I know like
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we always like to talk about this, is backup, backup, backup, right?
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Don't trust that your cloud provider is going to be backing up your data.
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Do your backups yourselves.
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Keep a copy because that could easily have saved this company.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, it would've made it a non-event.
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. It'd be a nice story to tell a cocktail parties about the time
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we almost lost the company.
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But, uh, and, and that admin would still have a job.
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Right?
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But unfortunately, they weren't backing it up.
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And again, this was a SaaS service.
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Right?
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Let's just make sure we understand this.
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This wasn't the same as the first story that we talked about.
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That was an IAS service infrastructure as a service.
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This was a software as a service.
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This was Google Drive.
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This was.
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Google Workspace, which is now what it, which is what it's now called.
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And, um, they had stored their entire world in that and then deleted it.
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If this story doesn't prove to you that SaaS services aren't
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backing up your data, number one.
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Number two, that they have no legal obligation to bring your
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data back when you lose it.
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Um, I, I don't know what story would, right.
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Yeah.
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W. Curtis Preston: Uh, 'cause they were sued, right?
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They did a, I mean, it was a, it was a hastily filed, uh, you know, sort
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of poorly written, uh, filing, but it.
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It, they withdrew it for a, a couple weeks later.
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Right.
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Uh, we don't have any details on that, but it, it wasn't good.
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Uh, the other thing is, you know, again, I mentioned it already, but
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just to remember that, uh, you know, I, I, I often like to throw out
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the phrase from Shakespeare, right?
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There's, there's more on, there's more in heaven and earth that
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is dreamt of in your philosophy.
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And I, I think sometimes we focus a little bit too much lately
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on cyber attacks and things.
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Just realize sometimes people just do dumb stuff.
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Fact, um, in fact, there's a couple of the stories that we have coming.
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It's just somebody doing something dumb.
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Somebody making a, a fat finger.
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The title of the headline for this was, you know, admin Fat Fingers.
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This company and, and basically deletes this whole company.
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So just realize it's, it's human error.
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Prior to hackers taking over everything, human error was the
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number one reason we did restore.
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Right now it's human error and direction.
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I don't know how, what category you wanna put that is, it's not always hackers.
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So the next one is really around keeping personal
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stuff on your corporate drive.
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I know it's hard.
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Everyone works remotely, right?
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You have a laptop.
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It's like, oh, it's too hard for me to go grab a personal device and
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start using that for personal stuff.
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Like who doesn't log into Gmail from their work computer, honestly, right?
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Or from their phone.
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And so things do intermix, but the problem is what happens on a corporate drive?
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Don't expect it.
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If it's your personal stuff that it will be kept forever and that it's safe, right?
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Personal stuff you should really take ownership of.
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W. Curtis Preston: Not to mention that by putting medical information
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on a company drive, you are subjecting that company to HIPAA requirements.
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Um, it, it's not something that you should be doing, uh, you know,
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on your, you know, on your, uh, on, on corporate systems, right?
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Just not.
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Yeah.
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There, there's no, not to mention, you leave the company, right?
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You're laid off, you're fired.
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Uh, you know, they, they have no obligation to give you that data back.
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Right?
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Um, the other thing is, again, that I would just wanna mention that one of the
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reasons why people talk about cloud data, not needing a backup as they're like, oh,
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well, there's always this recycle bin.
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Some deletions aren't covered by the recycle bin.
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Deletion.
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W. Curtis Preston: yeah, it sounds like account deletions.
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There are things that you can do in Salesforce.
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I was looking at a company that is specializing in backing up intra, which
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is what Microsoft Azure AD is now called.
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They were listing a handful of things that.
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When you mess them up in intra, they're not covered by the recycle bin.
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And this is another example, is that there are a number of things, again, there
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are more things in heaven on earth than you are dreamt of, uh, in Salesforce.
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I know for example, when you change a record, not when you delete
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a record, but when you change a record, uh, that's not covered by
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the recycle bin, they don't put the old version of That record.
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That would be crazy if they did
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that
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Could you imagine?
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I think this just goes to the point that backups are critical.
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You can't trust what, that, there aren't going to ever be
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these types of events, right?
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That just go and don't have a recycle bin or maybe even the product doesn't
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even have a recycle bin or your admin disabled the recycle bin.
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What are you gonna do at that point?
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W. Curtis Preston: Or the a or, or the hacker is able to clear out the
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recycle bin because recycle bins can be cleared out, uh, manually.
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Or what they can do is they can set the versions to one, you know, all
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these, you know, they're, they're just, it's just a whole bunch of things.
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This is why we back up.
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Right.
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This is, this is why it's just so frustrating to me that
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there are groups of people.
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Um, some of them who specialize in the platforms that we're talking
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about who say, oh, well you don't really have to bag it up, um, despite.
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There's a story, at least one story for every major platform we talk
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about, and we're gonna cover those stories in subsequent episodes.
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So yeah, so back up, back up, back up.
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Um, and, and make sure that that backup is stored somewhere other than
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the thing we're talking about, right?
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Because that's the other problem with the recycle bin,
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is that it's stored inside the thing, right?
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Um,
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or
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versioning is stored inside the
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thing.
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Or in this case, if they had backed it up to
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say a Google Drive under the same account, that wouldn't have saved them
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W. Curtis Preston: That wouldn't have saved them.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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You need to back it up to another account, um, uh, you know, to another account.
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You know, if we're talking about cloud to cloud backups, just make sure it's
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backed up to another account that has different, you know, authentication
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authorization and has really, really tight lease privilege turned on.
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Uh.
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And a different region perhaps.
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Right?
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Um, you know, there are other services to pull it outta the cloud if that's what
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you wanna do, but just make sure you're not leaving it all on the same place.
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Um, there are services to back up Google Drive.
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There are services to back up all of the things that we're talking about.
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And, uh, that would be my favorite way.
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If we're talking about how to back up the cloud, my favorite way to back up the
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cloud would be to back it up to the cloud, do cloud to cloud backups, but back it
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up to another service that you're paying
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to do this.
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Right, right.
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Um,
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I'm laugh you, you know why I'm laughing
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W. Curtis Preston: Why?
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Because you bought into the cloud service because you didn't
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wanna manage equipment, infrastructure, patching, all of that stuff.
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And if you went and you're like, Hey, I'm gonna go deploy an on-premises
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backup solution so I can pull my data down from the cloud because I wanna
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manage it and I want to do all the other stuff, that just seems kind of backwards.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I know, I know there's at least one major
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company that does it this way.
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Uh, and I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong.
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It just doesn't,
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it doesn't seem right.
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Right.
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Yeah, unless you have a very specific use case for
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needing that particular solution, I could imagine there are cases
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W. Curtis Preston: I will, I will say that there are those who
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disagree with me and feel that.
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We wanna get it out of the cloud for backup reasons, right?
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That, that, that the cloud is somehow inherently untrustable, for example.
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And so we're gonna pull it out of the cloud and, and store
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it in the, in a data center.
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And I, I just disagree with those people.
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Um, you know,
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we, we can, we could agree to disagree on that one,
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Yeah.
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Well, I'll give you
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a perfect example is data sovereignty
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requirements might dictate that you pull it out
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and hold it locally.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, it might be, that might be, it might be a, a valid example
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or a reason why you might want to do that.
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So, well, uh, our second sad story from the
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series,
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so
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thanks.
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Thanks for helping me tell the story persona.
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I am so depressed, Curtis, but hopefully it's
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a learning lesson for other folks.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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We don't want anyone experiencing schaudenfreude, right?
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Uh, we don't want them taking joy in these misfortunes.
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We want them learning, uh, from these misfortunes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We can definitely do that.
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And with that I want to thank our listeners.
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Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss an episode.
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That is a wrap.
