Chapter 14. Disaster Recovery

In late September 2009, users of T-Mobile's Sidekick smartphone began noticing outages in the service. The Sidekick was designed to push the envelope of technology by storing most of its data remotely and requiring network connectivity for almost every function it had. Come October, the company that ran the data servers for the service, Danger, had still not restored the information. Danger had been taken over by Microsoft in February 2007, and most of the employees that started the service had left the company, leaving Microsoft's own employees to field any problems. T-Mobile consequently informed their customers on 10th October that data recovery was not forthcoming, and that they believed the data on all 800,000 customers was irrecoverably lost.

The saga was further hampered by what Reuters, citing an email from Microsoft, called "a confluence of errors from a server failure that hurt its main and backup databases supporting Sidekick users." The commercial...