Danger Servers Sabotaged?
The plot thickens. There’s an extensive article over on AppleInsider that lays out more details regarding the possibles motivations responsible for the Danger Disaster at Microsoft. There are two theories: dogfooding and sabotage.
Dogfooding is a reference to the term “eating one’s own dogfood” or replacing competitor’s technology with your own for internal uses. AppleInsider’s insider source says
Danger’s Sidekick data center had “been running on autopilot for some time, so I don’t understand why they would be spending any time upgrading stuff unless there was a hardware failure of some kind,” wrote the insider. Given Microsoft’s penchant for “for running the latest and greatest,” however, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found out that [storage vendor] EMC had some new SAN firmware and they just had to put it on the main production servers right away.”
But as the article points out, what could have been the motivation for Microsoft to change technologies when they were already scuttling the Danger product in the attempts to save the Pink Project? Microsoft was only running things as they were bound by contract with T-Mobile. The article goes on to say:
Instead, the fact that no data could be recovered after the problem erupted at the beginning of October suggests that the outage and the inability to recover any backups were the result of intentional sabotage by a disgruntled employee. In any other circumstance, Microsoft or T-Mobile would likely have come forward with an explanation of the mitigating circumstances, blaming bad hardware, a power failure, or some freak accident.
An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.
So, was it sabotage? I’ve been saying all along that the level of this screw up is so high you start to think that someone has to be intentionally screwing up this much. Whether that’s actually sabotage or just Microsoft’s apathy and ineptitude is unknown at this point.
On top of all this, AppleInsider points out the obvious: T-Mobile must be irate with Microsoft right about now. Surely in their contract there was a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that dictated a certain level of uptime. And with almost two weeks of outage plus an enormous loss of data this “is the worst possible violation of the SLA conceivable”. I’m just waiting for the lawsuits between T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger to start.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Wow. I am also waiting for the lawsuits. You know they are coming. Microsoft messed up big time!
October 12th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
this is deff no surprise to me… i figured that this screw up was brought on intentionally by somebody or sombodys!
I figured that Microsoft purposely had done this to wreck the rep of the sidekick thus causing them to have to kill the danger sidekick…. allowing more time and money for focus on project pink phones !
tell me if i was wrong for thinking that ? does that make sense to any of you ?
well now after reading this blog.. it all makes sense to me now… watch EVERYBODY will be getting their data back! jeez thank god ~!
Such a waste of time ! MicroDanger Knows what they are doing ! 😕 at least i f*c*kng think that ! hopefully the sidekick future will once more become healthy ! 🙂
Ahhaahaha i bet i sound like a dumbass !
October 12th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
This would seriously be the only answer I could actually see happening, anything else seems…so unlikely.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Microsoft can afford lawsuits, so, them ruining the server for that great amount of time, doesn’t mater to them.
My questions is: WHY? Why, Microsoft? Why do you have to be so apathetic towards everything?
If only Apple had bought out Danger…
October 12th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Please if Apple had bought Danger, I would have sold my Sidekick the day after, hahaha. What some of you are missing is that the ‘sabotage’ could have came from Microsoft or an ex/disgruntled Danger employee who was there before MS bought Danger. I don’t think that Microsoft would intentionally cause this much Chaos, and data loss on purpose, I mean everybody is saying that MS wants to kill off the sidekick to make room for there WinMo phones and some new stuff they may have coming out. Why? Microsoft owns Danger, if Sidekicks are popular Microsoft is popular, they own the company, so the profits from sidekicks goes to MS, it would be stupid to wreck a loyal customer base for that reason. I mean, I guarantee like 50% and not more, of SK users are getting rid of the phone after this catastrophe, me being 1 of them.
I think this really has killed the brand, I can’t imagine myself every getting a sidekick again. I mean, T Mobile can release any phone they want under the “Sidekick” name, they own the name. They could release an Android phone named a “Sidekick” something, without the Danger platform. But with the bad taste this has left, and will leave in the taste of not just SK users, but non-users who are witnessing this disaster, if a newer model sidekick comes out, people will look back at least, and pass on it. Or maybe not, I mean, now that we don’t trust the phone-server back up feature, people could stay and not feel secure, it wouldn’t be any different then getting another phone that doesn’t have this feature and the Desktop Interface function, no other phone has it. I mean if I leave the platform now, and the godfathered $20 data plan behind, I wouldn’t come back to it later and have to pay $35 for data. This is it.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
You’re an idiot with all your moronic Microsoft bashing. You automatically showed what an idiot you are by quoting apple insider.
You bloggers are monkeys. Stop hating on microsoft and do something with your life. Maybe one day you can make a real salary with a real job.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Roz Ho, is that you??
October 13th, 2009 at 12:56 am
i think it is Roz Ho…….but besides that how are we monkeys be cause we are talking about whats going on and alot of us have real jobs like myself and about 80% of everyone else on here
October 13th, 2009 at 2:08 am
lolololololololololol
October 13th, 2009 at 6:43 am
(Hippie Approaches You)
“My Friend But You Are Totally Right, Its All A Conspiracie Man”
…
…
Lolz but I personally don’t doubt it, think. Microsoft bought a platform they don’t associate with using in their mobile devices, why!? (Hmmmmmmm)
Needless to say other devices have failed before, the blackberry outage, the iphone release parties and those lovely moments when it decides to crash and you have to restore it, android freeze ups and not receiving text or calls, but with something as big as has been this sidekick failure, its inevitable that all of us are speculating, specially with the fact that this only happened after microsoft buys the company, even if it was an ex danger employee/s who’s to blame, that still points the finger to microsoft for doing something that totally pissed that person (or people) off
October 13th, 2009 at 7:11 am
If you’ve ever been responsible for backing up a database you know it’s not a trivial thing. E.g. just backing up the files without stopping the database will result in mush, although if you throw enough money at that mush you should be able to recover a lot if not most. Perhaps T-Mobile released the Microsoft/Danger “no recovery possible” report to light a fire under Microsoft, seeing as how they are about to launch their Azure cloud platform to compete with Amazon/Rackspace/Google/etc.
The latest AppleInsider report says the “data center had ‘been running on autopilot for some time…'” and that it used the relatively complicated (due to its necessary goal of high availability) Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). It’s entirely believable that:
The RAC database was never blacked up correctly and this wasn’t caught due to a failure to spend the $$$ to fully and regularly test the backups.
Backups were being tested but that stopped due to Microsoft’s gutting of Danger’s operations staff.
Another possibility is that the load on the SAN got so high (too many IOPs required) that testing the backup was no longer feasible, or even doing the backup was no longer possible without service interruption which would require Microsoft to pay T-Mobile $$$ under their SLA.
Someone with enterprise experience says that this is common: backups are stopped because they interfere with operating the service and the solution is to upgrade the SAN. By the time the purchase of new hardware is spec-ed, approved and it’s in place even a one shot backup is not practical, so the manager in charge thinks he’ll solve all the problems with just the upgrade.
The specialists doing the upgrade get a signed by a VP “OK to do it without the backup”, fail (that’s not uncommon and why they get it in writing) … and you have today’s situation, where having a sufficiently hot fire built underneath them Microsoft is clearly groveling over whatever bits survived the whole mess and succeeding in retrieving some fraction of them.
October 13th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Are you kidding? MS is to blame if it was a disgruntled employee?! Kinda like Nicole Brown Simpson was to blame because she obviously ticked off OJ. Or jews really have to ask how they got Hitler so riled up.
Destroying thousands of customers’ data because you’re mad at your company is YOUR fault. No one elses.
FeenForKicks, remind me to never hire you. I’d hate that you decide that you needed a promotion, but since you didn’t get one, everyone in office must die.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Jesus’s nuts I made one comment u go off lolz
Sorry guy
October 13th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Reality is MS is to blame not Tmobile
October 16th, 2009 at 5:43 am
And to think After alll diis Shyt && we stIll don’t have dhe damn 3G network I
Sweah’ im gettinq an iphone
I’ve had 287 contacts nOw I have 0 – called them assh0lez Flippinq out bUt all they seem 2 Manaqe to say was a Lousy “Sorry”.. I’ve told’em to Step they Game up, & I wouldn’t Be surprised if they lost thousands of customer for this “So Called” accident!!
As for my cellphone bill this month: iM nOt fuckinq payinq iit, why shoUld I?? I cnt call nObodii Cuz I have nO coNtacts!! -_-
FoUr words For t-Mobile:
[ SteP-Ya’-Game-up ]
October 16th, 2009 at 5:47 am
LmfaoOooO get a lYfe Yue dweeb, We have a freedom of speech If yU don’t like iit then leave the ?.s.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:17 am
so what that microsoft messed up here. the fact or the matter is this: microsoft bought danger. why?? money. the platform is potential profit. microsoft advertisement editors use macs to edit and cut their commercials (research it if you dont believe me). danger uses linux/bsd at the spine of their operating system. microsoft is more than big enough to use and sell linux without anyone ever noticing or even giving a damn. so what happened here?? why the crash??
its one of 2 things. either microsoft wanted to sabotage the brand to steal the technology (without breaking the agreement they had with danger)
or danger employees cant stand working for the big bad new boss and all banded together to F^(k it up.
i dont know what really happened here but the fact that microsoft didnt have working backups is simply shameful. microsoft seems to not care about the entire danger platform. they have treated it badly since the merge. we ended up with a buggy product that was rushed out, it was under a whole new system that wasnt tested enough. they tried to make up for it by adding free social network clients but it wasnt good enough. microsoft has not added anything software related to the danger platform at all. they let the servers get over flooded, they didnt back it up, they didnt offer anything to the little dpwnload catelog except the stupid map. and ecen the map sucks. its slow, it doesnt offer as many features as google maps and all and all i just dont like what microsoft has done with the danger platform.
what do you guys think??