O2 website offers iPhone 3G pre-orders, promptly crashes

by Chris Scott Barr on July 8, 2008





Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...


The original iPhone was easily the biggest mobile phone launch ever. The only forseeable way to to surpass it will be with the launch of the 3G. Knowing this, if your company decides to promise an early online sale of the new phone, you'd better make damn sure that your servers are up to handling it. I'm looking at you O2.

O2 decided to allow customers to place orders for the new iPhone 3G yesterday, promising that the new phone would be delivered promptly on the 11th. However, the turnout was slightly more than they seemed to anticipate, as their site wasn't able to keep up. Many customers were greeted with a variety of error messages, and weren't able to actually place an order. As of now, the new iPhone is currently out of stock on their website. If you didn't manage to sneak through the errors somehow, it looks like you'd probably better get your camping gear out.

[via 9to5mac]

  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Live
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • SphereIt
  • Spurl
  • StumbleUpon
  • TailRank
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Pete 07.08.08 at 3:53 am

They are claiming that they are out of stock, but how can that be?
They asked you to pre-register your interest in the upgrade (so they had a pretty good idea of how many were going to be needed) so it cant have been too much of a shock can it?
I think they just could not cope with the web traffic (I received 11 separate “Upgrade Codes” via SMS) but never actually managed to get through the process, so they have abandoned the online launch, claiming to be out of stock as thats easier than admiting they screwed up

2 GC 07.08.08 at 9:03 am

“out of stock” is code for “we can’t handle the traffic”

Fill in the required fields below to leave a comment or login to your account. If you haven't signed up, you can do so free here. With iPhone Buzz account, you will be able to participate on iPhone Buzz Forums discussion.

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>