T-Mobile and Microsoft Deal With Sidekick Data Loss Disaster
Since the outage began last Friday, many users are still without access to personal data stored on Danger and Microsoft servers, including their calendars and contacts. Professional gossip blogger Perez Hilton has been particularly vocal about his displeasure with T-Mobile by loudly complaining about the cellular provider's failure to effectively communicate with its customer base.
Of course, this extended outage would be embarrassing enough if it ended there, but on Saturday things took a turn for the worse. T-Mobile announced that a Microsoft server failure had caused some customers' data to be lost forever. T-Mobile didn't specify how many customers were affected by the failure, but it didn't leave much room for hope, either. The company stated that, if the data in question wasn't currently on your Sidekick, it was "almost certainly" lost.
Until service has been fully restored, T-Mobile is advising all Sidekick owners to avoid turning off or resetting their devices, and to avoid letting the batteries die. The company has even taken the drastic step of (at least temporarily) ceasing the sale of Sidekicks while it irons out this debacle. As an apology, the company is offering a month of free data service (worth $20) to all Sidekick customers, or (for the truly furious) the option to ditch their T-Mobile contracts penalty-free.
This may have been just the wake-up call the cloud needed. In order to ensure the safety of customer data, companies must implement better and more comprehensive fail-safes. TechCrunch expects that this accident will encourage many businesses to set up their own backup solutions in order to preemptively curb the damage of such outages.
Technologizer pointed out that this could spell trouble for Microsoft, which snatched up Danger last year and plans to use the platform as the basis for its consumer-friendly "Project Pink" smartphones. This also has us slightly concerned about the reliability of Microsoft's newly launched My Phone cloud backup service for Windows Mobile devices. Of course, the implications extend beyond Microsoft and Sidekick devices. Google admitted to the SEC that its own systems are not completely redundant and are vulnerable to natural disasters, power outages, and terrorist attacks. Google has had a hard enough time keeping Gmail up lately, and that's without such dramatic catastrophes.
Of course, Twitter addict John Mayer has found the one silver lining in all of this: Perez Hilton may have lost over 2,000 contacts stored on his Sidekick. A happy day for celebrities indeed. [From: Engadget, Mashable, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Channel Web, Technologizer, Consumerist, Perez Hilton]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
inteller said 3:06PM on 10-12-2009
Well, MS and Tmobile just assigned a value to your data in the cloud....one month's service free. Sorry, but if that's all you think it is worth the cloud is dead.
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Neebz said 3:13PM on 10-12-2009
That compensation is a slap in the face. While I know I'm a bit old to be using the sidekick, a lot of people who have sidekicks only have T-mobile because of them.
Neebz said 3:10PM on 10-12-2009
I had all of my data sans a few notes and then yesterday the phone decided to reboot itself, which they advise against but I had no control over it. Now I lost about 1/3 of my contacts, all saved texts, picture messages and e-mails. The woman I got on the phone when she tried to make my phone go back on was like "You probably lost everything, you should have saved it on the sim" Well my opinion is most phones save everything to the phone not in the air and not backed up. They really effed the sidekick users. I hope they compensate more than the data fee for the month. No self respecting company doesn't back up their users data.
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Adam B. said 5:01PM on 10-12-2009
$20 is so weak. Free data? for what? it doesn't even work right now! AT&T should take advantage of this and tempt us over to iPhone. Imagine how many people would bite and leave T-Mobile.
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Reginald E Johnson said 2:42AM on 10-13-2009
Man, This makes me even more thankful, I have an iPhone! Thank you Lord! All my contacts and data are stored on my phone, backed up by my Laptop!
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