Microsoft Provides Hope To Sidekick Users With Lost Data

At the beginning of this week, T-Mobile informed Sidekick users that their personal data and photos "almost certainly has been lost." Now, Microsoft is coming back with some good news to affected users, saying the company believes it has recovered most of the data after all.

"We are pleased to report that we have recovered most customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage," corporate vice president Roz Ho wrote in a letter."We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible."

On Wednesday, at least two lawsuits were filed against Microsoft and T-Mobile over the Sidekick outages which started at the beginning of this month with data service interruptions. The issues have left many users without access to their address books.

The full text of the letter posted to the Sidekick Forums is below:

Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users

Data Restoration to Begin as Soon as Possible for Affected Customers

Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,

On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into these forums for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.

We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick Service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.

Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.

Sincerely,
Roz Ho
Corporate Vice President
Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation