Major outage affecting Sidekick users

Sidekick users have been suffering through a major data outage that began Friday morning. The outage knocked out internet service, IM, social networking, web browsing, the camera, and even users’ address books. As of last night, T-Mobile said it had restored service to “critical functions” and hoped to have it completely restored by Thursday.

Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, said, “We are working around-the-clock to get all our services back online and will continue to post status updates to our valued customers as issues are resolved,” Microsoft said. “We thank our customers for their patience and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this disruption has caused.”

Text messaging and voice service has not been affected but that has done little to soothe irate Sidekick users, who have flooded both T-Mobile’s and Danger’s support boards with angry posts. Many say T-Mobile was slow to acknowledge the issue and has shown poor communication throughout.

Danger is blaming a server crash for the outage and promises services will be 100% restored by Thursday, almost a full week later. There’s no word on why it has taken so long. T-Mobile, to its credit has announced it will issue users a credit equal to one month’s service to make up for the outage.

Read [CNet]