Customers trying to buy 3G iPhones on launch day are running into a litany of problems activating their phones.
iTunes activations are completely offline -- a result of a "global" server crash according to former PC World editor Harry McCracken, who overheard an Apple employee at the Stonestown Mall Apple Store in San Francisco.
Gizmodo's Benny Goldman estimates the crash started around 9:45 am.
According to blogger Cali Lewis, speaking on TWiT Live, if store employees think you have any sense of technical knowledge, they're sending you home with the phone to activate at home. If you don't, they're keeping you around to try to activate in store.
Jamie Diamond, an iPhone customer at the Freehold Raceway Mall store in Freehold, NJ told me the store manager told anyone who was waiting longer than a few minutes for activation to go home and try from there. He told me that when he asked for a paper printout of the contract he had just signed, the store couldn't manage that seemingly simple task. An Apple employee tried to call AT&T, but the mobile provider required store passwords that "nobody seemed to have" before talking to anyone.
Harry McCracken spent a long time with a salesperson who "seemed pretty close to clueless... Rep seems like someone Macy's brings in at Xmas without sufficient training." McCracken was sent home with a sealed iPhone box -- but wasn't told that he had to plug the phone into his Mac to activate it. He was also given no information about swapping the SIM card from his old AT&T phone and simply incorrect information about incoming and outgoing calls once the phone was set up.
Further complicating issues is the main iTunes download link is currently disabled. Users must have iTunes 7.7 to activate new iPhones -- but if they didn't download it yesterday, they are currently out of luck. Even if the activations server worked, not having the proper version of iTunes leaves users out in the cold.
An AT&T spokesperson told me that customers at AT&T stores are being sent home and told to "synch the device later at home while Apple works hard to resolve issues affecting its iTunes software."
One commenter on my earlier story about Apple VP Phil Schiller's comments on the activation process had some harsh words about his purchasing experience. "When I finally got inside I weathered 2 hours of being talked down to by the 'geniuses' while they assured me that it as AT&T that was at fault, not Apple. Nice partnership. What a disaster. I am home now trying to active on iTunes and it still doesnt work. I want a refund."
There are also scattered reports of some stores not getting ANY iPhone shipments at all -- leaving folks who spent the night in line with nothing to show for their efforts.
Did you try to buy an iPhone today? How did you fare? Leave comments below, or let me know.
UPDATE - 1:30PM EDT: There are some reports that people are able to activate their iPhones through iTunes, but all commenters on that thread up to 1:58 pm say they still can't do it.
UPDATE 2 - 2:30PM EDT: Two commenters on the other thread reported connectivity starting six minutes ago, but one of the respondents says still no luck.
UPDATE 3 - 3:26PM EDT: Lots of commenters are saying that things are slowly getting back to normal.
SEE ALSO: Photo Essay: 3G iPhone (un)activation excitement
More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:
- Special Feature: The iPhone naysayers, one year later
- Prediction: Apple will ship
Comments
What a disaster! Wonder if after retiring from Microsoft, Bill Gates has taken over Apple.
In NH I got a phone, but at 9AM EST they were unable to activate it and started sending people home with iPhones to activate "later". 4 hours later, still no iTunes ability to activate...
I got the last phone in my local AT&T store. Couldn't activate so they sent me home with a brick and a prayer. But they DISABLED my T-Mobile phone, so I have no service at all until Apple gets its act together. FAIL!
Aren't we a bunch of spoiled babies. For God's sake... it's not the end of the world and you know Apple will get this fixed. Our instant-gratification society needs to step back, take a deep breath and relax. The sun will still come up in the east tomorrow.
Em Gee, silly comment. MS has managed to serve Vista updates to millions of millions of customer with little problems overall given the size of the task. Apple could learn a thing or two about online support (remember the XPSP2 download? millions at once upgrading via windows update, worked fine) I bet you that if Gates was in charge of the roll out it would have been far, far more resilient, credit where credit is due mate....you are criticising MS for something Apple has been crappy at and MS has been rather very good at, or is it just your daily MS bashing to make you feel good?
Yeah, I am pretty much in the same boat, a few people were able to activate right around 8 am, but pretty much failed around 9. So I am also here trying to activate, but with no luck! :(
Im stuck without a working phone because I was stupid and tried to update my iPhone this morning. Im missing important calls from my business while Apple has turned off their phones. I feel bitten by the Apple.
SUCH A DISASTER! I waited 3.5 hours and just as I was about to get one everything crashed! They wouldnt even let me purchase the phone because the little mobile devices they had were all frozen trying to connect to ATT. I was 2 hours late for work and had to leave. 300 people in line behind me, all very distraught as well.
im on hour 3 of attempting to activate me phone.
youd think that theyd expect over half a million people or so to be doing the exact
same thing at once and prepare for it.
another issue... my phone has a massive scratch.
but they comforted me by informing me of the 14-day return policy and theyll
just exchange it out.
this is just embarrassing for both apple and att.
Yeah, I think this is AT&T's fault, their servers weren't robust enough to handle the activations being funneled their way. Similar problems with O2 in UK, from what I hear. Other countries didn't have these problems.
Same Sh*t here !...
What a pain !
No, DW, we aren't spoiled. Our old phones are deactivated. This means that we have no service, and we paid at least $200 to have no service. This is not acceptable.
I do feel confident that Apple will resolve this, but I'm one of those that was just trying to download iPhone 2.0 and got stuck 3/4 of the way through the process - with an unusable brick and no cell service.
Now I just need to keep plugging and unplugging iPhone from iTunes - hoping that one of these times, it works.
Someone could have seen this coming, I think.
just back from 5th avenue store, they sent me home. No server success here either, itunes is out completely. After waiting 3.5 hours in line all I have is essentially a BRICK, with no service, can't load anything and no one telling me when that might happen.
Great Job guys!
Really... Who are all these dumbasses complaining? I just bricked my phone and yeah, it's a PIA, but I can make it through my day. Besides, over time, this will be a fraction of the difficulties you would have had if you bought a phone from another maker today. The iPhone is great, the demand is too big. Why aren't these idiots complaining that they had to camp out? If you're that impatient, don't play ball on big release day. I do sometimes miss the days of marginalization...
16gb sold out in London I'm being told. Tried updateing to 2.0 on current iphone and now lock in an unusable state due to the itunes severs being down for most of the day. Have been told this may last up to 24 hours.
Bought mine at about 9:10 am, and at around 11:55 am, the phone all of a sudden 'activated' itself. So I am good to go, GPS, Wifi, and phone works.
I am trying to sync to iTunes but I am in the error -4 loop. If you are following the blogs, this is the second "loop" of current errors.
Should be ok later. Apple does recover from these downtimes pretty quickly. We'll see.
Good luck folks!
I have a phone. I'll activate it later. Disappointing, but no big deal. I need to get some more sleep anyway. I'll let Apple work while I'm doing this. Zzzzzzzz.
Same thing is going on with Rogers in Canada. Their entire system is down and can't sell any iPhones, or give any pricing information regarding upgrading. They only had 1 8gig iPhone there.
What a joke.
I got my iphone right at 8am this morning after about a 3 hour wait. My phone was activated and I was out of the store within 15 minutes. I guess I got lucky-- I was told by one store employee that he is out of sales altogether for AT&T and that he was just brought in for the "3G" launch.
I upgraded to 2.0, but can't connect to iTunes to finish upgrade, now I can't use it until servers are back online.
I waited in line for six hours, only to be let into the store to wait in another line for an hour more. The people at the Clarendon, VA store were totally clueless. Most of them were just standing around doing nothing other than laughing and giggling, while the customers sat there patiently. And to make matters worse, almost every Apple employee was condescending and rude. They treated us like we were morons. And to add insult to injury, it turned out that I have a corporate discount from work that I was not even aware of. Once the Mac Geniu....Fucking Retard, figured this out, he basically told me to leave and that there was nothing they could do about it. I mean, I know I was sort of in the fault here, but at least be courteous. They probably were having a rough day, but that is no excuse to treat customers standing outside for six hours like complete shit. I will never go inside the Apple Store in Claredon again. Apple and AT&T totally blew this one.
Didnt get a 3G phone, but got stuck upgraded to 2.0... download, then stopped because of the same server connection leaving me only with 911 calls...
WHILE on the phone with apple for over an hour, it at least activated (but can't connect to itunes, or load media) LOST ALL CONTACTS!!! I was told I could MAYBE regain contacts once the server is cleared and I can restore from backup...
OH! and I was told I had been warned for this... in the pages of my iTunes manual which says an restore or upgrade may take 6 hours... RIDICULOUS!
Apple, where's my giftcard for this?? I had calls to make I missed today.
Arrived at the AT&T store on Sepulveda in LA at 3:30 am. One person in line. By 8am there were several hundred in line and this is not the highest traffic store in the area.
Got in promptly at 8am. No problem getting the 16Gb black phone but I was #3 to be served. They unbricked the phone but sent me home to activate it on iTunes. No luck yet at 10:15a PDT.
The store was very well staffed with about 8-10 lines/cash registers. Employees were well trained, and a manager hovered in the background, intervening instantly whenever a sales clerk was uncertain about something. The sales process (but I was the first one of the day for that clerk) took about 15 minutes.
They handed out bottles of water to those waiting in line, a thoughtful gesture.
I have to give that store and its manager highest marks. Not their fault the servers crashed.
DO NOT LET THEM SEND YOU HOME WITH A SEALED (WRAPPED IN PLASTIC) PHONE PACKAGE. IT HAS TO BE UNBRICKED AT THE STORE, UNLESS THEY CHANGE THE ITUNES ACTIVATION SOFTWARE.
Sadly, I plugged in my iPhone 1.0 this morning to sync with Exchange... It said to update and, without thinking, I said yes. Now, it is bricked until iTunes returns.
Great, Apple, just great.
- W.
I think those that got there early, on the east coast got things done without problem, when the rest of the country went on line that is when all the problems and over loads started to happen.
The line at the 5th avenue store was moving very briskly until 10:00 AM, then it started to go slower, as 11:00 AM when the west coast woke up and started selling phones everything ground to a halt and that is where we are now, a complete standstill. From what I can make out, no one is getting activated and its starting to spread like wild fire!
It's going to be a public relations disaster for Apple if they don't get this sorted out very very quickly!
They are going to have thousands of pissed off people with new phones trying to activate their service and in the mean time they can not even play with it until the service goes back up.
Really not a great thing on opening day I must say!
yep, after 4.5 hours i am without any working line, 2 iphones bricked, i would bit*h but don't see much point to it, unfortunately.
THIS IS NOT TRUE!
DO NOT LET THEM SEND YOU HOME WITH A SEALED (WRAPPED IN PLASTIC) PHONE PACKAGE. IT HAS TO BE UNBRICKED AT THE STORE, UNLESS THEY CHANGE THE ITUNES ACTIVATION SOFTWARE.
Everyone: You may be interested in seeing what Apple's VP for marketing had to say, when the Standard ran into him at the Apple store in Boston with his son. Check out Jordan's exclusive story and photo here.
Also, there were some critics -- including Steve Ballmer, John Dvorak, and Dan Gillmor -- who believed that the original iPhone was overrated when it first came out. We tracked them and four other iPhone critics down and asked what they thought of the iPhone now. Not everyone responded, but those who did had some very interesting opinions. Check out The iPhone naysayers, one year later.
Bought my Iphone at 10:30 AM, EST. Was told to go home to activate. Sales rep said to call her if I couldn't activate by 2PM, EST. I don't know why 2PM, but after several attempts, still no activation. Error code -4. At least I have my current Sprint account working. Apple should have seen this coming. These problems do not bode well for Apple. Additional servers, or whatever should have been enabled to handle this massive rush.
don't worry people if you have bricked iphones.........i NOW HAVE 2 BRICKED PHONES....old and new
Hour 3 of waiting in line at Apple Store, Valley Fair. Activations are going smoothly but slowly. Lots of people from Apple corporate here helping out.
It's not AT&T... It's Apple...
I have an Ipod touch and I can't get the thing to update at all...
I can't even get to the appropriate iTunes Store page for the 2.0 update.
That has nothing to do with AT&T.
I'm afraid the problem is indeed and undeniably iTunes.
Apple is not infallible after all...
Apple Devices: A+ (at least)
Apple Update/iTunes Servers: D+ (at best)
I am confident, however, that in 24 hours Apple will have this mess cleared up.
Everyone hold your horses.
Apple will make it right.
I'm on my 4th iPhone (not 3G, b/c that is not worth it as of yet) and I cannot get it to sync up... I downloaded iTunes 7.7 and then downloaded iPhone 2.0, but now it just hangs, tryng to connect adn giving me the server error -4 over and over all day long. I WANT A REFUND and some FREE APPS for this mess. I HAVE NO PHONE!!!!
I forgot to mention that I was upgrading an older iPhone, and it is still working fine, so the failure of the upgrade servers is a small disappointment, nothing more. Presumably the old phone will stop working when the new one is activated.
I suppose I could try swapping out the sims, but I don't like to fool with AT&T's mystery process.
The AT&T store, by the way, is at Sepulveda and Pico in Los Angeles. Good staff, good management. Sorry about those who have had different experience.
Yup, bought one this morning. Got to the local AT&T store at 6:30 or so, intending on taking a picture and mocking all the losers on line. Nope, only about 15 people there, so I decided to wait and upgrade. What a mistake that was. 11AM I finally walk away with an inactive phone. Still can't activate it. Nobody bothered mentioning the whole simcard situation to me, so as far a I knew - I had nuttin.
Very poorly planned out...one can only assume that the 'crash' was caused by volume...and how they could have not expected that when starting at 10AM every apple and at&t store in the country was going to be bombaring them with activation requests, I will never know. last time was so smooth because at least the activations were staggered as people got home. Poor form for both AT&T and apple.
Billy, it was your decision to wait in line for six hours... what should apple do - thank you for sitting on their doorstep while they were closed? As for the attitude of the employee you dealt with - well, I have doubts as to how patient or polite you were to him.
I am throwing up reading this article and 99% comments! People, why don't you do something productive today rather than complaining. If your phone will be activated a few hours later, this is not the end of the world.
I stood in line at a Rogers store in Ottawa, Canada, for 2.5hrs, and managed to get a 16GB White; one of four available. The staff were very knowledgeable and helpful. However, even though I was the third person in line, only the two before me with a pair of 8GB Black 3G's were able to activate, after roughly 20-minutes each of 'connecting' progress-bar wait time on the store's iTunes application. By the time I was jacked in, and 40 mins had gone by w/o any activation, Rogers' staff instructed those comfortable with 'home activation' were offered the units. Myself, and several others chose this option, after we had signed contracts etc. Personally, i'm pleased we were able go home with the 3G's to activate at a later time. I still wait for iTunes activation to function, and get the 2.0 firmware for my iPod touch, but i'm certainly not angered by this; it'll happen when it happens - for now, I'm working, and come the weekend, Apple will have things figured out. They're resourceful people; this will get fixed. Meanwhile, the world continues to revolve. No point getting uptight about this.
I was #35 in line and by the time it was my turn to purchase my iPhone (around 10:15am Eastern), the AT&T reps weren't even attempting to activate the phones because "the network connection was too slow" so they were sending everyone home to activate their iPhone. So I had my 1st gen iPhone deactivated, headed home with my sealed iPhone 3G, and when I tried to connect it to iTunes it kept giving a "We could not complete your iTunes Store request. The network connection was reset." error message. So I now have no mobile phone to use at all. I had the same issue when I stood in line for the 1st gen iPhone (didn't work until the next morning). I survived that and I'll survive this.
Another thing I thought was interesting is that only the manager was allowed to give the iPhones to the reps, and the reps were not told how many iPhones were left in the store. Just before I was about to enter the store, the manager came out and told everyone in line that they were running low on the 16GB model, so if they sold out they would activate people's accounts for it now and those customers would be first on the waiting list. Luckily I didn't have to worry about that, although those people will probably be able to activate their iPhones immediately once they get them.
I was planning on waiting, but drove by an AT&T store in Richmond, VA and there were only about 25 people in line. They ran out of black 16GB phones after about 20 people, but had plenty of the white ones. I got into the store at 9:15, people had been going in and coming out at about an average of 7-10 minutes. A family of 4 got up there around 8:30 and were taking forever.
At about 9:00 the process slowed significantly, as we speculated in line and a manager confirmed, the addition of Central Time stores brought the whole thing to a crawl. I started the process at about 9:15 and my phone was activated and ready by about 9:50. Overall not a terrible experience, but the employees were cautioning people in line that they expected to be pretty much useless when the West Coast came in around 11. Obviously they were right.
all stores in my area (northern va) sold out. no one has any clue when more will be arriving.
I don't know what you people expected from such a HUGE product launch. The fact that everyone seems so surprised at the way this thing turned out amazes me. Even I'M not so naive to believe that the process would be flawless.
Although I too want an iPhone, I’m waiting until the bugs are worked out. You see, I have patience. I don’t need to be the first in line to have ANYTHING. Nor, being witness to the obvious fiasco going on in the Apple stores, would I be such an idiot to allow them to “disconnect” my existing cell phone before my iPhone purchase was fully functional. For those of you who allowed this to happen, it’s your own fault.
Get a life, people... It’s a CELL PHONE.
Matt: The fact that I plugged my old iPhone into my mac and tried to have it update to 2.0 and it is now a brick, is not the end of the world.... but it is really a pain in the a$$ when you use your phone for business like me. I pay a lot of money to own this thing and Apple's stupidity is literally costing me more money.
All of both Apple's, AT&T's, and the various iPhone news sites say the phone comes bricked and first has to be unbricked by the store before it can be activated by iTunes. The manager at the AT&T store told me the same thing, and though they could not activate it they were able to unbrick it without a problem.
An interesting bit of trivia; the clerk told me he wasn't allowed to remove the shrink wrap; he asked me to do it before taking the phone out to connect it for unbricking.
This process is different for the 3G than for the original iPhone.
The problem is that they do the first step in the store before the new iPhone is purchased. They won't sell it to you until after they have switched the number from the old iPhone to the new iPhone (still sealed in the box).
You can take the new iPhone and do the final step yourself with iTunes if you have 7.7. The problem is that it needs to connect to the iTunes Store. This is still down (for final activation). This results in not being able to use your old iPhone to send or receive calls, nor your new iPhone at all.
I wasn't expecting to be phone-less today.
This sucks...but is oh, so worth it!!!!!
My upgrade to 2.0 finally connected to iTunes. Its working great now.
Any of you who thought a launch of this magnitude would be seamless on the first day need to chill. I'm sure it's a pain in the ass, but get a life! There is huge demand and huge volume. Worldwide! Did you expect perfection on a day like this?
How is the iTunes server crash AT&T's fault? Everybody is looking to blame somebody. As soon as the rush dies down a bit iTunes will send the signal to unbrick your phone. Your account was activated and provisioned before you left the AT&T or Apple store.
I joined the boat by trying to do my 2.0 firmware this morning and getting my gf an iphone cause her verizon plan is up this month. According to Kerry I'm an idiot, probably, but it is a cell phone and I have an office phone that works fine so I'll deal with it.
Completely expected lines and issues(the same thing happened release day last year, I waited had a good time, there were delays but when you're an early adopter you expect it) Apple will work it out, the phone is going to be great and people are going to be happy.
What makes the situation bad is the me me me make me happy right now people flipping their shat that the phone isn't working right there or the fact they had to wait, no one has a gun to your skull and if you want to moan about lines or issues, get out of line and come back in a few days when they are solved.
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