T-Mobile has at least temporarily halted sales of their popular Sidekick phone. This action is in light of a likely data loss for their customers caused by events apparently connected to a recent server outage. The Sidekick is one of the few phones that is highly dependent on a remote server for storage and updating of data such as contacts and calendars. The phone is very popular with teens and also has a very large user base of hearing impaired users whose Sidekicks act as a replacement for more traditional TTY. The outage and data loss is raising eyebrows because Danger is owned by Microsoft who is therefore tasked with securing this data. A loss of user data for a pay service would be a significant black eye for the company as it looks to ramp up services to battle competitors like Google in the cloud computing market.

CNET