The official line is still that T-Mobile customers affected by Sidekick amnesia will be given a months' credit on their data plan, but that may not be the end of it (and considering the magnitude of the issue for affected folks, we'd certainly hope not). At this point, they're leaving the door open to more by saying that they're "considering additional measures" to help soothe the souls of those who lost contacts, notes, schedules, apps, and everything else, but exactly what those "measures" are remains to be seen. Free phones? Free service? A gift certificate to a day spa? The full (albeit brief) remarks can be found after the break.

Backing up your personal PC to external media might still be a novel concept for some, but any IT manager fresh out of school can tell you that regularly backing up mission-critical servers -- and storing those backups in multiple physical locations -- isn't merely important, it's practically non-negotiable, and it only becomes that much more critical before undertaking hardware maintenance. Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger's doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which -- for reasons unknown -- fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

The coming weeks are going to be trying times for both Microsoft and T-Mobile, a sideline player in this carnage that ultimately still shoulders responsibility for taking users' cash month after month and keeping tabs on the robustness of its partners' workflows. We're betting that heads are going to roll at both of these companies, formal investigations are going to be waged, users are going to be compensated in big ways, lawsuits are going to be filed, and textbooks could very well be modified to make sure that lessons are learned for the next generation of college grads tasked with keeping clouds running. Why there weren't any backups -- even older ones -- that could've been used as a restore point is totally unclear, so we're hoping Microsoft has the stones to come clean for the benefit of an entire industry that wants to understand how to make sure this never happens again.

Granted, the original report suggesting that swarms of iPhones actually broke Duke's WiFi network did seem a bit bizarre, and now it appears that the university is freeing Apple's handset from blame. Interestingly, the actual culprit still seems somewhat veiled in secrecy, as we're only informed that "a particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service," but never do they exaggerate on exactly what caused the hiccups. Still, Duke also stated that it worked in conjunction with Cisco and Apple in order to "identify the network issue that was causing the problem," and since Cisco stepped in and provided a fix, the prpblem has yet to repeat itself. Looks like you're off the hook on this one, iPhone.

It's probably of little consolation to the addicts among us who spent several terrifying hours in connectivity withdrawal -- and even less consolation, still, to the newly liberated -- but RIM's apparently figured out how its notoriously reliable back end came to a crashing halt this week. The company is now pointing its finger at "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" to its caching mechanism as the culprit. "Non-critical," indeed. Anyway, it seems said system routine was not put through enough testing ahead of its deployment to RIM's production systems -- and to make matters worse, its failover setup (hamsters on wheels, perhaps?) didn't pull through, significantly delaying the amount of time to get everything back online. We suspect most users are still a little too shocked at the chain of events to be steamed (yet), so consider this your strike one and two, RIM; just make sure it never happens again.