Exhibit A, of course, is the , with Microsoft subsidiary Danger in the key role as the clueless initiator of disaster. ("Gee, I wonder what pushing this button will do...") They screwed the pooch in a half-dozen ways, starting with a weeklong outage that went completely unacknowledged until Sidekick users started kicking up a fuss in forums and the media picked up on it.
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Then it took them another few days to warn users to not reboot their Sidekicks (which is the first thing you're told to do when something isn't working right) because that would wipe out their data. Then the announcement last weekend , followed by another announcement that maybe .
T-Mobile -- which appears to be mostly blameless in this scenario, -- reacted by offering free data service for October, a $100 credit, and a halt to new Sidekick sales, and reportedly is letting people out of their contracts without penalty. No matter; .
Microsoft/Danger have yet to explain what happened, but speculation is rampant. There can only be two reasons for : One is a Keystone Kops level of ineptitude by a lot of different people at Danger; . And given the rancor following Microsoft's , the sabotage theory is starting to gain some traction. All you need is one disgruntled employee with some technical savvy to leave a software time bomb behind.
Exhibit B: The Apple Snow Leopard upgrade. Amazingly, some unlucky Mac users who access their systems using the "guest" login get a special treat: . (As the saying goes, that's no way to treat a guest.) Apple has acknowledged the problem, says only a small number of users have been affected, and is . If not for Microsoft's complete bungling of the Sidekick situation, Apple would be in the hot seat this week.
Exhibit C: For the past 10 days or so, Facebook has been grappling with a data loss problem of its own, which . About 0.05 percent of its users -- roughly 150,000 if Facebook's subscription numbers are to be believed -- had their personal profiles flushed down the technology toilet.
I've been in touch with a well-connected Cringester who lost close to 5,000 contacts in Facebook and was in the process of slowing rebuilding her friends list, one FBer at a time, when her account was finally restored. She received an e-mail that attributed the disappearing act to "an extended technical issue." Hmm, ya think so?
However, parties close to sources inside Facebook tell me the service was hacked. (If I can confirm that, or learn more about the actual cause, I'll let you know.)
If that's true, -- though it would be the first time so many user profiles were totally scotched. Still, regardless of the cause, it's troubling, especially because I don't know of any way to .
Wait, we're not done yet. If you live in Sweden, for a brief period you were transported back to the pre-Internet era when -- effectively making nearly a million Swedish sites invisible to the InterWebs.
No data was lost, as far as I know. But think about it. The entire Web can be taken down for want of a single period. Does that make you nervous? It should.
The lessons du jour: Back up early, back up often, and don't rely entirely on something that might not be there when you need it most.
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