Microsoft says its technology is not to blame for Sidekick outage

Data has been restored, lawsuits are flying but Microsoft technology may not have been to blame.

Microsoft apologized for the service outage that affected customers with Sidekick devices on T-mobile. It said that it restored most customers' data. But it also insists that Microsoft technology was not to blame. This hasn't stopped numerous lawsuits from being filed.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall while Microsoft and Danger figured out a way to recover the data. I'm envisioning some kind of a Apollo 13 epic endeavor, where all seemed hopeless and lost until the minds of brilliant technologists figured out how to reconstruct data from melted down servers. I can see the T-Mobile exec, hands on hips, eyes blaring, while a Microsoft-employee, in the Gene Kranz-role (played by Ed Harris) retorts with the famous line, "With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour." (Click link to listen to Harris's voice.)

Sidekick data is handled by Microsoft subsidiary Danger, and while Microsoft on Tuesday in no way tried to shrug off responsibility for fixing the problem,  company executives were also trying to distance themselves from it.  In the apology letter, posted on the T-Mobile Sidekick forum, the company said the outage was caused by a vague system failure.

"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."

That much we all knew. Some system definitely failed somewhere. But apparently, Microsoft wants folks to know that Danger doesn't use Microsoft technology, despite the fact that Microsoft purchased the company in February, 2008, and wanted it to play the dog food game and convert to Microsoft  products. This is, in my mind, a fair enough requirement.  But a Microsoft spokesperson told the L.A. Times that Danger never got around to doing that. 

“The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft’s cloud services platform or Windows Live," Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause wrote in an e-mail. “Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform and software. ... for native Microsoft services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, Azure, etc., we write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail."

Still the Sidekick outage will go down in history as one of the worst outages of a public information service. Opportunistic users and lawyers (along with those who were no doubt genuinely hurt by the loss of data on their devices during the downtime), have been busy filing lawsuits. A story in CNet reports on several such suits including ...

One suit, filed on behalf of a Bakersfield, Calif., man "and all others similarly situated" charges that, among other things, Microsoft and Danger failed to use reasonable care in handling Sidekick owners data and that the Sidekick was falsely advertised. That suit seeks monetary damages as well as an order requiring the companies to fix the Sidekicks and service or offer a full refund.

Other news sites are reporting on a class-action lawsuit filed by a woman in Atlanta and one filed in the state of Washington. Given Microsoft's deep pockets, I'm not surprised but I'm also doubtful that any of these suits will progress very far, particularly if Microsoft and T-Mobile do the right thing and credit users for the whole month's worth of service fees. But the damage to Microsoft's reputation as a cloud computer provider is done, even if its wares technically weren't to blame

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