Geekonomics

Thank you, T-Mobile

Oct 14, 2009 03:17

T-Mobile has been a trending topic on Twitter over the past few days, due to an outage on customers' cloud-based sidekicks this month.

T-Mobile Sidekick Slide (Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Apparently, this hosted data service is managed by Microsoft's Danger division (which Microsoft acquired) and T-Mobile had initially warned that Sidekick data lost would not be recoverable.

Obviously, this came as a shock to many customers, especially those who thought the service outage was only temporary and did not realize the data lost could be permanent. I believe even many industry professionals were surprised that data would not be recoverable, a highly unlikely scenario in the highly backed-up world of enterprise computing today.

At the time of this writing, expressions of shock, horror, and hatred are still streaming into Twitter. Here's just a couple of tweets that this geek picked up in the last half hour: 

@leanbrim #T MOBILE these ni**** crazy how u lose my contacts and my notes wat the f*** i had mad rhymes in my sh** dont email me text me

@SimplyKula I hate T-mobile... 

And even complaints about the poor customer service:

@babydoll25 @t-mobile ur customer service dept needs retraining badly i cant wait til my contract is up

Alas, the perils of cloud computing. But today, it seems, T-Mobile has managed to recover some customers' data and is giving away US$100 gift cards over the next 14 days, which can be used on any T-Mobile products or phone bills, in addition to the free month of service that T-Mobile is giving to every Sidekick user.

I don't know about you, but if I lost all my phone data without any of hope of recovery, US$100 is not going to make it up to me. In fact, I would pay a whole lot more to have my data recovered. 

Anyway, it seems customers are happy with T-Mobile's efforts so far and you can see them thanking T-Mobile pretty frequently, like this one for example:

@heatherayers needs phone numbers. All of my contacts have been erased. Thanks, T-Mobile.

Or how about this one who's really genuinely thankful to T-Mobile?

@ThatBostonGirl thank you T-Mobile, my ex had a Sidekick, now he'll never remember my number #blessingindisguise

There's a lot to thank T-Mobile for, indeed, but this girl seems to forget that we now live in an age where your ex doesn't need to remember your mobile number to track you down online. 

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