October has been a bad month for the Sidekick and the future of what’s left of the Danger team. Not only was there the Great Sidekick Data Outage of October ’09, now we’re hearing that Project Pink, a Microsoft project that the remaining Danger team was put on, might not even be seeing the light of day.

MobileCrunch heard some interesting news from an anonymous source that seems to be legit. Here’s the bullet points:

# As I reported previously, most of the Danger team has been fired or left.
# If any of the Pink devices ship, supposedly they will not have third party application support, i.e. no App Store/Download Catalog.
# The Project Pink employees are not happy. Most of the team still uses Sidekicks or even iPhones and “hate the product”. And here’s the best quote from MC’s source: many feel that the division exists only to “challenge [the Windows Mobile 7 team] and upset them into competing.”
# The project is about 2 years behind schedule and some basic applications are getting cut in an attempt to someday launch this thing.
# The touchscreen on the “Turtle” is not a viable touchscreen as the UI contains too many things on the screen at once and your finger ends up covering half the screen.
# The design of the user interface was done by a 3rd party and now Microsoft is trying to actually build the thing with some difficulty.
# And finally, the worst news for the 2 remaining Project Pink fans: MobileCrunch’s source says that the project “is near death and probably will be canceled.”

Ouch, this is of course all unconfirmed rumors, but if any of it is true… our sympathies to the remaining Danger employees.

Trash can photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/katmere/. Device images via Gizmodo

Did your weekend suck because you didn’t have data service? Were you one of the unlucky ones who had a hard reset and spent the weekend with an empty address book and no social life? Give T-Mobile Customer Care a call (611 from your Sidekick or 1-877-453-1304 from any phone) and request a credit on your account for the data service downtime. We’ve heard reports of varying credits ranging from $5-$30, so good luck! Let us know how much you get and when you finally get data service back! We got a credit, but are still waiting on that pesky G to come back. We recommend you straight up ask them for a full month of service credit.

T-Mobile is reporting that users should be getting service back shortly, and that you’ll need to log in to the Danger servers with your username and password that you probably setup ages ago. If you can’t remember your login info and you didn’t get a reminder text from T-Mobile, give them a call to reset it.

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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.