Nokia's Ovi Loses Data After Cooling Failure

A data center cooler failure has contributed to a data loss for Contacts by Ovi, a beta service that's part of Nokia's Ovi personal portal. The outage led to the loss of all contacts and photos stored on the service (previously known as Nokia Chat) since Jan. 23, the company said.

"A cooler broke down in the hosting center that we run the Chat service in," explained Kristian Luoma, product manager for Contacts on Ovi. "This event lead in to two catastrophic consequences from our point of view. Firstly we had to ramp down the service down for a very long period, in fact most of the yesterday morning and afternoon we had a service break. Secondly, our database broke down. Despite the fact that we had regular back-ups, we were not able to set it right."

Oviis similar to Apple's MobileMe, which experienced repeated problemsduring and after its launch. Contacts by Ovi was a beta service, but is coming under some scrutiny for its backup practices (or lack thereof). See additional coverage at The Register and SlashGear.