Outage Plagues T-Mobile Sidekick Users
Users of Danger's popular Sidekick, or Hiptop, device have found themselves unable to check e-mail or send instant messages since Sunday due to a technical glitch. T-Mobile, which sells the device and is a major Danger investor, has has taken the brunt of customer complaints. Both companies are promising a fix by Wednesday.
"Danger and T-Mobile regret any inconveniences experienced by Sidekick customers as a result of an identified technical issue that has been limiting customer access to data services since Sunday, March 6. Voice and SMS functions on the Sidekick are unaffected," Danger said in a statement to BetaNews.
"Danger engineers have put fixes in place, and expect data performance to improve throughout the day on March 8th; and full service to be restored by tomorrow morning, March 9th."
However, Sidekick users are up in arms at the extended outage and have voiced concerns at the Hiptop.com forums over the lack of communication. Danger, which handles the affected data services for T-Mobile users on its own servers, first acknowledged the issue Monday morning, but remained quiet since.
T-Mobile customer service representatives were unable to provide more details to those calling in, instead offering credits for $5.
"It would be okay if this were a free online service, like say Google's Gmail, but I pay $20 a month for Sidekick service, and it's sold as being as reliable as my cell phone service," T-Mobile customer Numair Faraz told BetaNews. Faraz says he has been unable to access any of his data for two days.
The Sidekick service interruption is the second high-profile snafu for Danger in as many weeks. In late February, socialite Paris Hilton had her personal photos and phone numbers publicly exposed on the Internet after a hacker gained access to her Danger Sidekick account.
But Danger downplayed the significance of the recent network problems, refusing to characterize the issue as an outage. "This did not affect all users and was a degradation of service rather than an outage," a spokesperson told BetaNews. "Even affected users could still make phone calls and send text messages."