T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Microsoft/Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup

Quote from Tech Crunch of what happened:

T-Mobile and Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure. That means that any contacts, photos, calendars, or to-do lists that haven’t been locally backed up are gone. Apparently if you don’t turn off your Sidekick and make sure its battery doesn’t run out you can salvage what’s currently stored on the device, otherwise you’re out of luck: Microsoft/Danger is describing the likelihood of recovering the data from their servers as “extremely low”.

T-Mobile Sidekick users have been suffering from a major outage all week, and that issue apparently hasn’t been resolved either.

This goes beyond FAIL, face-palm, or any of the other internet memes we’ve come to associate with incompetence. The fact that T-Mobile and/or Microsoft Danger don’t have a redundant backup is simply inexcusable, especially given the fact that the Sidekick is totally reliant on the cloud because it doesn’t store its data locally. Microsoft acquired Danger for $500 million in February 2008.

Still too early to tell what happened. But key lesson learn perhaps is: server do crash, we just don't know when it happened. Hence: fasten your seatbelt, provide an 'air bag' for your data ... do backup your data now, don't wait until major crash (that eat all your data) happen.

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T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Microsoft/Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup

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