“Non-Microsoft technologies” to blame for Danger/Sidekick failure, Microsoft says

Oct 15, 2009 10:11 am by Kip Kniskern | 4 comments

After more than a week of silence on what caused the Sidekick outage with Danger, the Los Angeles Times today quotes Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause, not really explaining what happened, but definitely distancing Microsoft cloud services such as Windows Live and Azure from the Danger platform:

“The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft’s cloud services platform or Windows Live," Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause wrote in an e-mail. “Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform and software."

and:

Microsoft drew a further distinction between Danger and its other data assets, saying that "it’s important to note that for native Microsoft services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, Azure, etc., we write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Klause wrote.

Still no word on what caused the loss of data (which may not be a total loss after all, not much news on that either), although there has been speculation that the failure happened in an attempt to move the open source Danger platform to Microsoft technologies.  Microsoft still needs to come clean on exactly what happened, and why, in our opinion.

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