Massive cloud failure wipes out customer data on T-Mobile Sidekicks

An outage over at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary has resulted in the loss of data for T-Mobile's Sidekick customers. For the uninitiated, the Danger Hiptop mobile device stores most of its user data in volatile memory, and synchronizes whatever it needs from T-Mobile's data network via the Sidekick service.

The problem stems from the back-end data service run by Danger. Based on the latest reports, it appears that the bulk of this data is gone for good. According to a statement by T-Mobile, "personal information stored on your device--such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos--that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

How could a Cloud service just fail like this? According to some reports, the Danger network ran on a SAN infrastructure. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) had been contracted to do remedial work on the infrastructure when it failed in some catastrophic way as work was being done.

How such a total failure could even happen is mind-boggling, and will likely be the focus of many case studies in the future. For now, T-Mobile has suspended sales of Sidekick phones in the United States. Hitachi Data Systems declined further comment beyond saying that it is "investigating the cause of the problem, which has not been identified at this time."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Register
- check out this article at Computerworld

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