T-Mobile Still Holding Off On Sidekick Sales
T-Mobile halted Sidekick sales Monday after a database glitch in Microsoft's Danger subsidiary, which runs the Sidekick service, caused some users to lose the personal data on their devices.
David Beigie, vice president of corporate communications for T-Mobile, Seattle, declined to offer a timetable for when the carrier might resume Sidekick sales.
"Sidekick sales are temporarily on hold as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability," Beigie said in an e-mail.
T-Mobile has been dealing with undeserved fallout from the Sidekick outage that hit its subscribers last week. On Thursday, Roz Ho, corporate vice president and head of Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) division, said Microsoft has recovered "most, if not all" of the data that was feared lost, and that the outage was caused by "a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup."
While it's certainly possible for both a primary and backup database to lose data, most companies mitigate their risks by having redundant backup schemes in place, said one solution provider, who requested anonymity. What's interesting about this case is that Ho referred to a database "backup," added the source.
"They only have one backup? The way to solve this is to have multiple backups. Everyone does this, and then you do a restore from your most recent backup before the data loss or corruption," said the source.
The outage affected only a "minority" of T-Mobile's approximately one million Sidekick subscribers, according to Ho. Nonetheless, it has come at an inopportune time for the carrier, which has been struggling to keep pace with competitors that offer a never ending array of flashy new smartphones to their customers.
Although T-Mobile has every right to be upset about the outage, Beigie suggested that the carrier appreciates Microsoft's attempt to make amends.
"We're pleased that Microsoft/Danger is continuing to make progress. T-Mobile's sole focus remains on helping Sidekick customers recover from this disruption," Beigie said in the e-mail.