Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users

Roz Ho, vice president for Microsoft’s division in charge of the Sidekick:

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

Great news. Perhaps their statements last week, that the data was “almost certainly” lost for good, were along the lines of under-promising and over-delivering.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up.

Well, that certainly explains it.

★ Thursday, 15 October 2009