Why Your Cell Phone Contacts May Be Erased

I have a friend who had this happen to her. She vows not to renew her T-Mobile contract.

Sidekick contacts, data gone, T-Mobile says

NEW YORK - Owners of Sidekick phones may have lost all the personal data they stored on the phone, including contact numbers.

The phones are made by a Microsoft Corp. subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile USA, which say many Sidekick owners' information is "almost certainly" gone after a failure of servers operated by Microsoft wiped the data out. The companies said they hoped to update customers on recovery efforts Monday.

The phones have been troubled by data outages for more than a week. Some users attempted to restart their phones by removing the battery, which erases data on the device. Normally, the data is then restored from servers, but with the server data gone, the device is left empty.

Read more on the Sidekick failure.