T-Mobile takes on patsy role in Microsoft Sidekick fallout

Danger: No services for next $100

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 14th October 2009 10:17 GMT

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T-Mobile plans to compensate all Sidekick customers who lost their data following the extremely embarrassing server outage at Microsoft’s subsidiary company Danger on 2 October.

The telecoms giant, which markets and distributes the device, is offering Sidekick users who suffered a “significant and permanent” loss of personal data a $100 “customer appreciation” voucher.

Sidekick maker Danger was bought by Microsoft in 2008, since when its servers and backup devices have operated at Redmond data centres.

It’s not clear how many Sidekick customers were affected by the major server cockup, but what is surprising is the fact that T-Mobile - rather than Microsoft-Danger - has taken the hit from the epic data loss fallout, even though it had no control over how the backend was managed.

Microsoft said in a vague statement on Tuesday that there was still a chance of data recovery for Sidekick customers, however it didn’t reveal how much content could be reinstated.

“We, however, remain hopeful that personal content can be recovered for the majority of our customers,” said Redmond.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s “customer appreciation” voucher will be coughed up in addition to the free month of data service (worth around $20) that unhappy Sidekick punters have already been given.

Microsoft admitted earlier in the week that a "confluence of errors" from the server failure hit Danger's main and backup databases, causing the deeply shameful cloud computing data collapse. ®

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