Sidekick data to reappear
The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion.
Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after worries that users’ contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed.
“We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible,” Roz Ho, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, said in a statement, adding that the company now believes the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.
Ho said Microsoft would release another update on the data restoration effort by Saturday.
In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Microsoft said the problem was isolated to servers run by its Danger Inc. subsidiary, which it said was not part of the company’s main “cloud” infrastructure.
If the data are restored, Microsoft may dull the negative echoes of the episode, which initially looked to be one of the worst incidents of online data loss in recent memory. At least two lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and Sidekick carrier T-Mobile USA Inc., and the Sidekick appears to have been taken off the market by the two companies.
--
