Welcome to the Great Sidekick Outage.

This was to be the Great Sidekick Outage of 2009, except this is from what I can tell, the single, largest failure of T-Mobile/Danger in history and thus no need to specify a year.

For those who don't know, I'm a T-Mobile Sidekick user and have been since March of 2006. It's been good and bad, but mostly good, and I liked the fact that all my contacts, settings, messages, et al were saved on Danger's backend servers. This means that any time I got a new Sidekick, or lost/broke one, I wouldn't have to be one of those people with a throwaway "New Phone, Need Numbers" Facebook group we all know and love so well.

Well, last week (10/2), data service went out. It remained out for the weekend and returned sometime the beginning of this week. A lot of people reported losing their contacts and data by doing a hard reset or turning their phone off, which I was sure not to do. Then, yesterday, in the middle of web surfing, my phone reset itself and took my contacts, settings and data with it. The second-to-worst thing that could happen, happened: My local device was reset, and the backend servers are down.

Now if you've been following along, this means that I have no contacts, no emails, etc, until the Danger servers resync back to my phone. There is no way to force this to happen. All you can do is wait.

Worse is Danger (acquired by Microsoft of all companies, in 2008) and T-Mobile's communication or lack thereof, to the customers. Save 3 or 4 forum posts in the past seven days, we have no idea what's going on. All we know is that they're "working" on it. Suffice to say this is not nearly good enough. I've only been without my data less than 24 hours, but there are some who haven't had their information since last week. While T-Mobile has auto-issued a credit for a free month's worth of data to its Sidekick subscribers, we're way into the "unacceptable" realm.

I'm doing my best to remain calm about the situation and wait it out, but it's really quite irritating when the company won't even give us anything more than "just wait". I can't say I can reasonably justify the cost of a new phone and higher data plan due to this, but if my contacts and settings don't come back and I do have to rebuild from scratch... I'll consider it. That was one of the primary reasons I stayed with my Sidekick; 3 years of data were there, and I wasn't going to have to re-enter it by hand.

The clock is ticking MSDanger.

Relevant links:
T-Mobile Sidekick Forum
T-Mobile Forums: The Epic Data Disruption Thread
Powered By Danger: T-Mobile USA General Forum
Powered By Danger: Sidekick Service Issue Sticky
Sidekick Desktop Interface (Log In to My T-Mobile before clicking) (Currently down)
Official T-Mobile Twitter