Legal Fallout Begins in Microsoft Sidekick Screwup

Posted 10/15/2009 at 11:31am | by Bart Salisbury

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Like we didn’t know this was going to happen. Last week Microsoft’s Danger unit experienced an outage, the result of which cost a lot of T-Mobile Sidekick users their email, contacts, calendars and other data. At first it was feared that the information was gone for good--a victim to the hubris over cloud computing. T-Mobile went so far as to halt sales of Sidekicks until the problem was resolved. Silver-linings what they are, Microsoft announced on October 15 that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data initially feared lost.

But a lawsuit over the matter was an eventuality, regardless of what Microsoft or T-Mobile did after-the-fact. Sure enough, two class-action lawsuits have been filed in federal court against Microsoft and T-Mobile. Both contend that Microsoft and T-Mobile failed to exercise suitable care, and failed to securely and automatically back-up user data. T-Mobile has offered compensation to those affected: one month’s free Sidekick service and a $100 card, but that’s not good enough for plaintiff attorney Jay Edelson, who says this fails to “sufficiently compensate Sidekick users for this disastrous loss of data.” Neither Microsoft or T-Mobile have commented on the pending litigation.

Naturally, one has to wonder how Danger messed this up. You’d think, as a cautionary matter while using a new technology you’d have a secondary, more traditional back-up, system in place. I guess some lessons simply have to be learned the hard way.

Image Credit: Darren Sylvester/flickr