CNET's article "Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft" describes a concern over Microsoft's reliability to host and store data as a service. The article reacted to a massive service outage that has lasted a week, which prevented users from accessing their calendar, address book, and valuable data. Worst yet, Microsoft announced on Saturday that some data may be lost permanently.
This outage comes one month before Microsoft launches a cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.