One of the biggest wireless carriers in the United States, T-Mobile, has temporarily suspended on Monday the sale of its popular Sidekick mobile phone following complaints by users of massive server malfunction and personal data loss.
According to reports, customers said that they have lost saved personal information in their Sidekick mobile phones after its server malfunctioned. Data such as calendar, contact details, and messages were all erased in the process.
Due to this reason, T-Mobile has raised the “temporarily out of stock” sign in its website. The carrier has pointed a finger to its data service provider, Danger, which is also a subsidiary of Microsoft Corp.
In a statement released over the weekend, T-Mobile, together with Danger has expressed its apology to all affected consumers.
“Regrettably, personal information that has been stored in the device were lost due to server failure at Danger-Microsoft,” the statement read.
The carrier and its subsidiary said that they are now addressing the problem and hoped to update patches by Monday. However, the companies said that they are not certain on the recovery of lost data, saying that chances of restoring them are “extremely low”.
Analysts said that the data loss incident was a huge slap to Microsoft, which is currently having trouble with its market shares. Some one million Sidekick phones were already out of the market and the companies are now tracing how many users were affected.
Due to this reason, analyst said that Microsoft and T-Mobile shares could further slide down as Nokia’s Symbian, Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s Blackberry, and Google’s Android phone make strong push to acquire bigger portion of the pie.
“Because of the failure by Microsoft to secure the data in Sidekick phones, T-Mobile may be sent down the bottom of the competition as many users fear another incident. Talk about bad public relations,” an analyst said.
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