Personal information on Sidekick mobile phones lost due to server failure
In arguably one of the worst disasters in the history of cloud computing, U.S. mobile phone operator T-Mobile reports that personal information stored on Sidekick mobile phones “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.” Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary and the manufacturer of Sidekick, also provides services to store Sidekick users’ personal information including contacts, schedules and photos onto its servers. As it has been revealed that the Danger datacenters did not maintain a backup, the likelihood of recovering lost data is expected to be very low.
Not only this fiasco is a serious blow to the reputation and credibility of both T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger, it is also likely to discredit the entire cloud computing industry as a whole. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it may be that any data in any storage facility is prone to hardware failure and therefore can be lost any time unless proper measures are implemented, e.g. making backups.
