T-Mobile announced yesterday that Microsoft had recovered most of the T-Mobile Sidekick customer data thought to be lost when there was a server malfunction last week.
According to the T-Mobile press release:
"We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible."
T-Mobile has been trying to downplay the incident by saying that, "We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users."
T-Mobile also described the problem this way:
"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."
It went on to say, "... we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick Service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained."
This is good news to most Sidekick owners who may have lost data, but obviously not to all. Some may still not have their data restored. Several T-Mobile customers have also filed lawsuits against T-Mobile, basically for not meeting up to its promises of providing a safe and secure backup of files.
In addition, T-Mobile hasn't resumed the sales of the Sidekick phones, and declines to say when they will be put back on sale. Not exactly a vote of confidence in Microsoft as a T-Mobile partner/supplier.
Of course, now everyone is speculating on the future of Danger, the Microsoft subsidiary that was providing the storage and back-up services for Sidekick data. Microsoft appeared to try to throw it under the bus this week - which probably made the folks at Danger who were working round the clock trying to restore the data real happy.
Not sure whether this is a case of alls well that ends well, but there are probably more than a few T-Mobile Sidekick owners who are happier today than they were last weekend.
Whether this episode slows the spread of cloud computing, remains to be seen, although I tend to doubt it.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.