The iPhone 4 Pre-Order Is A Big Failure - AT&T To Blame?
Apple is having a very bad day today, its worse in quite a while probably. Indeed, victim of its popularity, the launch of the iPhone 4 pre-order isn't going very smoothly. Actually, it's nothing short of a disaster.
On top of the noted absence of the white iPhone 4 (Official answer: "we will be adding the white models as quickly as we can"), Apple's entire pre-ordering infrastructure went down today all around the world, and most catastrophically in the US.
So what happened? Well, Apple was clearly overwhelmed by the pre-orders. It's a pretty common situation at Apple lately and it's usually shortly resolved. Of course they could have been better prepared, but oh well.
Unfortunately, the US iPhone 4 pre-ordering process involved Apple's most popular business partner, AT&T, which couldn't cope with the load as well and saw many of his systems go down. Reports are indicating that in-store pre-orders are now down to being processed on paper. The word behind the scenes is apparently that AT&T updated its systems over the weekend and faced some major troubles, which haven't been yet resolved. On top of that, they would have failed to test their infrastructure for this sort of intensive usage. This of course hasn't been confirmed.
Next, just in case that wasn't enough, the systems still standing slowly started serving false data to users. On one hand, many pre-orderers received confirmation emails and information which indicated the wrong pricing (don't worry about it, it's just a bug). On the other hand, more problematically, some users started seeing the accounts of other customers when trying to log in. Basically, AT&T might have leaked all your personal details and phone logs to some random stranger today.
There was still some hope for those who just wanted a reservation as Apple's newly released Apple store app apparently allowed it. Nevertheless, today is a disaster and the day isn't even over yet.
How was your experience? Did you get your order through?