You’ve probably heard either a lot or very little about the Sidekick failure. At the beginning of October, on a Friday, T-Mobile Sidekicks lost contact with the servers that support their data functions, and those services were completely unavailable until Monday morning. During the following week, some improvements were made, but the service was not back to normal. A full week after the initial contact loss, Microsoft acknowledged that personal data had been lost, and the party line was that a hardware switch-out was to blame.

A failed hardware switch-out was always a lunatic story. When hardware fails, you replace the hardware and install any relevant backups. The Sidekick service had run for years without any issues even approaching this, so what happened here? And for that matter, if you but dimly remember hearing about the Sidekick back when it was the It Device, what does Microsoft have to do with it?

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