On Tuesday, some T-Mobile customers may have experienced service disruptions impacting voice and messaging services. We restored full service to all affected customers later in the day. After investigating the cause, we have determined that a backend system software error had generated abnormal congestion on the network. T-Mobile has since implemented additional measures to help prevent this from happening in the future. We again apologize to those customers who were affected and may have been inconvenienced.

Basically, everything should be back to normal, but if you're still experiencing service issues outside of the ordinary, please let us know in the comments.

It's not a system-wide fail, and we still like the Surface, but who doesn't love an error during promotion? Microsoft "goons" apparently hustled Yves immediately out after he snapped this shot, before he could do any more damage. Keep stickin' it to the man, readers! [Thanks, Yves!]

Correction: The Windows 7 touch UI above was not developed by the surface team, and so this general error message has nothing to do with them, and concerns only the separately developed UI.

According to reader Cody, this happened live on his local NBC affiliate station. It may not be of olympic proportions or have the ability to rip the time-space continuum, but it looks like we have a first class candidate for the Windows Error Contest 2009 Edition.

And it's not even January 2nd. [BSOD and Windows Errors at Gizmodo]

The Redmond giant is able to get its lawsuit off the ground because of a recent law update called the Computer Spyware Act, which not only bans illegal spyware, but any other program that misleads people into believing that their computers need to be fixed. The fake error messages sent to Windows users, some of whom have received over 200 a day, fall under that category.

Microsoft's asking for a fine of up to $2,000 per incident, plus restitution and attorney's fees. Considering half of the customer support calls it receives are related to spyware crashes, that's a lot of money. But whether the suit will deter “scareware” purveyors is still up in the air. In 2006, Microsoft filed a similar case against the same people and won... to little effect it seems. [Dailytech]

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan's sent a message and Emine's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn't exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family's home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, with a knife on his chest, Ramazan tried to escape. Emine was still trying to finish him on the door, but he managed to take the knife out of his chest and attacked back, wounding her. Ramazan finally escaped, and was caught by the police, but Emine bleed to dead as the family waited for an ambulance to cross Ankara's hellish traffic to reach their home.

Confused by all the events, he later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it's not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing "serious problems" when it comes to certain "delicate words" in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Alternatively, the press could ask for banning knives from the homes of demonstrably stupid people. [Hurriyet—in Turkish—thanks to our Turkish-speaking readers for the corrections]