Some Apple fans were finding it hard to make use of their new 3G iPhones on Friday as a flood of shoppers trying to activate their new handsets overwhelmed Apple’s iTunes servers. The overload caused Apple’s iPhone activation process to crash for part of the day, turning thousands of new 3G iPhones into glorified paperweights.
Tech-savvy Apple fans, many of whom waited in line for hours - and in some cases overnight - to get their hands on the 3G iPhone should have seen this coming. It doesn’t take a computer genius to figure out that, with tens of thousands of people queueing up from Tokyo to San Francisco, there was bound to be a crushing load on Apple servers at some point during the day.
But over-eager early adopters were not the only ones suffering yesterday, according to reports from the blogosphere. Apparently, owners of first-generation iPhones who plugged into iTunes for a software update also found their phones turning into bricks, as crashing iTunes servers left them unable to complete the update process.
The result was, as they say in California, a bit of a bummer.
By midday in San Francisco, the problems that had plagued both sets of users throughout the day were showing signs of easing. Asia had gone to bed, lessening the load on servers. By mid-afternoon, the frantic Twittering about failed software updates had largely ceased.
By all accounts, the 3G iPhone is one of the most exciting devices to launch this year. Too bad for Apple that its launch got off to such a rocky start.
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