Apple’s latest mobile device opened up for pre-ordering late last night/early this morning. You can only pre-order it in black, with no word as to when the white version will be available. That is, of course, if you can get your order to go through at all. It seems that AT&T is once again testing it’s relationship with Apple by completely breaking down and even breaching users’ privacy…again. Things have gotten so bad that Apple’s online store is also having problems and pre-orders are being done using pen and paper.
What it seems has happened is that AT&T’s servers were completely overwhelmed by pre-order requests. First, users were unable to order online, so they went into the stores. The problem there is that the stores seem to rely on the same system, so orders were taking anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to process. Sales people at the stores just kept pressing submit on each screen until they didn’t get an error.
Other users were shocked when they went to access their accounts and found that they had full access to someone else’s information. Probably a pretty scary situation for many and I wonder how many people didn’t even notice the glitch. There are probably a number of AT&T customers out there who have just pre-ordered an iPhone and don’t even know it.
There are a couple of ways to get around the issue that seem to work. Best Buy and possibly other outlets are having no problems accepting the pre-orders. This may be because they are not processing them in real-time. You can also use the iPhone Apple Store app, but you may not get the upgrade price. You’ll be paying $699 instead of $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB) and, hopefully, AT&T will sort things out for you later. This won’t even extend your contract as there is not connection to AT&T with this method.
At least one customer reports that he had no problem pre-ordering his phone, but it shows as being backordered by 2 or 3 weeks. This is not a good look for AT&T at all. They recently left a gaping hole in their system, allowing 114,000 iPad customer emails to be taken. Coverage for the iPhone on AT&T’s network is a spotty for most. If Apple wasn’t planning to bring the iPhone to another network already, they are probably rethinking their options.
More details at Gizmodo.