The reports are lighting up like a Christmas tree on SignalStrength and T-Mobile’s Customer Care confirmed that we are in the midst of a nationwide outage of the Sidekick Data service. It started late last night/early this morning and the 2-dots have been dancing all day long for everyone. So stop toggling airplane mode, put your Sidekick down, take a deep breath and relax. We’ll get through this together. T-Mobile didn’t give an estimated time of resolution, but said things should be fixed “shortly”. If it’s really impacting you, you might have some luck calling Customer Care and requesting a credit on your bill for the outage. Usually this will be in the form of free minutes or a $5 credit.

In some very sad news, it looks like T-Mobile Germany may actually be bringing down the axe on the Sidekick. There is a post over on teltarif.de that gives some cause for concern. What, you can’t read German? Here is the content of the article, translated via Google:

T-Mobile announces Sidekick services on 31 December
The reason is termination of service by American producer Danger

T-Mobile announces the remaining value of a current Sidekick, the Sidekick service as well as the Sidekick Data option on 31 December this year. This confirmed a spokesman for the company over teltarif.de. The reason for the termination of the options is to set the Sidekick service by the American producer Danger. The smartphone of the Californian company, originally under the name Hiptop become known in Germany and were initially exclusive to E-Plus markets. Later, T-Mobile devices on the German market. The mobile telecoms subsidiary called smartphones, but – as in the U.S. – Sidekick.

Termination option, but not termination

As the T-Mobile Press Office notifies the service center Danger for the whole of Europe on 31 December, so that any user of the device – no matter under what name – which is affected. In the U.S. offer Danger’s service, however, continue to converge, as there are also more recent Sidekick devices are sold and they are enjoying great popularity. From the termination had several thousand T-Mobile customers affected, the spokesman Dirk Wende.
The affected customers are in the tariff options, but not the whole contract being terminated. As it says in the letter: “Your T-Mobile contract shall remain unaffected and continue to exist.” Turning points, however, if the customer is at the T-Mobile hotline turn, will be a “solution together with the customer” can be found. Here you will also offers customers to switch to current equipment and fares subject. Wool partout but the customer terminate the contract, there will be also a possibility, since each Hotliner a “some leeway”, so the T-Mobile spokesman.

It’s a bit difficult to read, but it looks like Germany is losing the Sidekick, but that it will continue on in the United States: “In the U.S. offer Danger’s service, however, continue to converge, as there are also more recent Sidekick devices are sold and they are enjoying great popularity.” Unfortunately the only English article we can find on this says “A company spokesperson attributed the move to the Sidekick service being terminated by Sidekick manufacturer Danger” and a similar statement is given in the sub-headline of the German article. Hopefully this is just a translation mistake and they intend it to mean that Danger is terminating the German service and not across the board for all Sidekicks. Regardless, it’s a sad day for all the German Sidekick/Hiptop users.

Thanks Mike!