Sidekick users see data in the cloud evaporate

Sayeth T-Mobile: DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power if you haven’t already.

I had Sidekick II back in the day and it was so cash. I saw one for the first time in years yesterday and I remember being surprised they still existed. Apparently, people are still using them, and some of them got a bit of an unhappy surprise this weekend with an untold amount of customer data being “almost certainly lost.” Microsoft subsidiary Danger had a server outage, and lacking the foresight of a 3rd grader writing a book report on Captain Underpants, they didn’t back your shit up.

T-mobile gets bonus points for their candor here, releasing a statement on Saturday that details the outage and the fact that data is unlikely to be recovered and your friends with iPhones are almost certainly going to be smug and snarky about the whole thing. Full text of the statement, below:

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.

We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that 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. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ. We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.

In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.