With so many new features in the latest iPhone update, and the less than stellar upgrade proposition to 3G S, iPhone 3.0 OS day was a mini PR disaster waiting to happen.
Not knowing when iPhone 3.0 was going to be put on-line meant that many people were constantly polling Apple’s update service until it happened, 3.0 was released.
Problem was that O2 promised the 3.0 on the 17th and owners had hoped that could be from 9am or earlier, in the US others thought that this could be from midnight, Eastern or West Coast time, no one could be quite sure. Whatever, when the download became available a million iPhone fans went for it.
Given the pressure on the servers, Apple did a reasonable job of getting 3.0 to the world, but not all systems seemed to be spec’d up for the event.
Having upgraded the firmware, the iPhone needed reactivation, a completely automated process, but with a few million rather than a few thousand, iTunes failed, utterly swamped by the traffic. Worse still was the error message making it seem that users’ connectivity was the issue!
With unusable handsets on desks it seems most came up with the same solution, keep on re-inserting the cable. Manically, some tried over 30 times making the swamp a flood of requests delaying activation further.
So if you are tired and frustrated, with an unusable handset, or worse, who are you going to blame? Apple did not have a good day.
Oh , and O2 have messed up MMS as well. Have a happy Thursday.