The cloud's fine print, demonstrated live on 800,000 phones
Sidekick outage at Microsoft's Danger unit threatened all user data
The market's verdict: +3.2% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
On October 2, 2009, servers run by Danger, the Microsoft subsidiary behind the T-Mobile Sidekick, failed and took the phones' cloud with them. Contacts, calendars, photos and email for an estimated 800,000 users vanished, because Sidekicks kept nearly everything server-side. On October 10, Microsoft told users the data was almost certainly lost; on October 15 it announced it had recovered most, if not all, of it, blaming a system failure that damaged both the core database and the backup. Having the backup fail with the original is a special kind of achievement. T-Mobile suspended sales and handed out gift cards while everyone recalibrated what "stored safely in the cloud" meant.
This one is officially acknowledged.
Links
↳ caused by Danger service failure (October 2009)
Timeline
- Oct 2, 2009 Confirmed First reports came in.
- Oct 15, 2009 Mitigated Most, if not all, customer data recovered.