Well this is a fine kettle of fish. iPhone activations have essentially gone down and everyone - from folks updating their old phones to new 3G activators - are stuck with bricks until traffic dies off. Reader Brent reports:
Hey Just a heads up…my iPhone, and looking at their forums, everyone else’s iPhones are bricks because the last step of their update process is to connect to the App store which can’t handle the traffic of people updating…looks like everyone is just in a holding pattern with bricked phones until the traffic goes down…wonder how many users are effected…their are a lot of pissed people, including me and apple says, do not disconnect or try to reboot the phone and keep trying until it works…this means everyone with an iPhone is either out of a phone today or has to sit home and keep trying to connect…fun stuff
What is happening is that users are trying to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware and then when the system tries to activate their phones they go into a reboot or restore more, thereby disabling the phone and forcing another update and, with the current traffic, causing the system to fail again.
Our own Peter’s Ha’s 2G is bricked right now as well. Do not update.
Visit CrunchGear for a possible fix.
UPDATE - You think a bricked iPhone is bad? I stood in line for 5 hours and got bupkus. My reaction:
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well, duh.
i said no!
boos helps me get down the stairs with style
http://www.epiclosers.com/load/8-1-0-309
This just in: If you stand in line to be one of the first people to buy a new gadget, don’t be surprised when things don’t go completely smoothly. That’s the price you pay for being the first.
Will the fanboys stick by their hero? Or will the tide turn? Based on Rick Segal’s experience, i’d suspect the latter.
A better question could be, should apple have forseen this issue?
Of course they should have. 1.5 million orig iphone users, all itching for the new software and thousands buying the new one. I mean, common sense would say so. Right?
Why doesn’t Apple release the firmware a week before the iPhone goes on sale? That way the existing users will finish their upgrades before the new users try logging in. It’s called staggering the traffic people.
@pedalpete, you must be joking, right? they will all forget about this once their phones start working again. No one is going to be fleeing from Apple.
Gee, I don’t need a website and software to activate my Windows Mobile phone…
…nor my Blackberry
…nor my Palm
…nor my Nokia N95
…nor my.. well you get the idea.
“wonder how many users are effected…their are a lot of pissed people,”
It’s affected and they’re.
I hope there is an english for dummies app at the apple store.
What a bunch of lame-asses. Not only have the rendered my current phone to be useless but now I get to fork over another $200 to apple since I bought my Gen1 phone three months ago, so thats $600 to apple in three months time, not to mention contract bills… could have been making payments on a new car or something… sheesh!
Apple’s problems don’t stop there… Stores with the limited stock are selling out all over.
http://www.appleiphoneapps.com.....-sold-out/
@Tom
No, but you’re stuck with a Windows Mobile Phone. I mean, who’s worse off, really? ;^D
I agree w/ #5 - this update has been ready to go way before the new iphone came out today. Gen 1 iphone users should have been able to update to 2.0 before the damn phone launch. It would have killed the traffic problem.
Imagine if this happened to Microsoft Windows on launch day?
Microsoft is like the older child who has to take care of everything and gets blamed for everything that goes wrong. Apple is like the spoiled baby that gets away with everything.
Is that picture of a brick wall subliminal?
If I squint at it the darker bricks spell out a dirty word.
I stood for a couple of hours in the queue at the Apple Store in Regent Street London. They had massive server problems and could not activate the iPhones either. Around 12:00 they had managed to unlock a handful of iPhones and were starting to send people away. They told us it was a problem with the O2 credit check server s though. O2 on the other hand said their systems were running fine.
It was kind of hilarious since they had all this media there and then nothing happened for a couple of hours. EPIC FAIL describes it best. But we are used to it you know. First Terminal 5 at Heathrow and now the iPhone launch
I got mine now.
Basti.
A ray of hope - after having an iPhone v1 paperweight for the last couple of hours, mine just kicked back into action and is now working on fw 2.0.
For those of you curious about what the Twitterverse has to say, check out “iBrick” and “iPocalypse” on Summize (http://summize.com/search?q=iBrick and http://summize.com/search?q=iPocalypse). I’m kinda glad I didn’t wait in line this morning :-\
(I’m not affiliated with Summize, I just like their app)
That’s a funny reaction.
You expressed my thoughts exactly in the video. Denied. Epic FAIL. Sadness ensues. Darkness. Darkness.
@Jason, Palm is well.. Palm and the N95 is well.. Symbian, which, for one, seems to be more open than the iPhone, but then again I’ve spent plenty of time playing with S60 (on my N95) and not too much on the iPhone OS.
while hindsight would suggest that Apple should have opened up access to 2.0 software days ago to 1.0 owners, I’ll let that go for a moment.
but, what I can’t come to terms with is why Apple still let me get caught in upgrade purgatory while I was blissfully unaware of the problems this morning. why couldn’t they have told 1.0 customers to hold their horses for a few hours or a day while they worked on the problem.
instead they just drew more and more people in to multiply their problem.
I would like a phone that works today.
I remember a lot of issues with AT&T activation with the original iPhone launch and it took me a few days and several phone calls to AT&T activate mine. After I got my phone forking and saw how awesome it was I forgot all about it. At least this is keeping Apple in the spotlight - No publicity is bad publicity?
@Paul
I really hate people that correct grammar on the web. I especially hate people that incorrectly correct others. It’s “there” not “they’re” like you so politely corrected the writer.
The problem of making a consumer company and its products your gods. Apple is not the second coming.
People are too moody. Calm down and let them fix the issue and we’ll all move on with our lives. You don’t need your phone to breathe. So stop acting like you do.
Number one overused word today and every day: FAIL.
Where is the official response from Apple? Where is Jobs? I’m tired of the “you shouldn’t have upgraded on Day 1″ or “What did you expect” BS. It was Day 1, not beta day or alpha day. Apple isn’t running on a shoestring budget. I want some money back honestly. I’m paying for phone service today and I’m not getting it.
You’d have thought that Apple would be intelligent enough to anticipate the demand for upgrades today and have provisioned additional server capacity to handle the load. Unbelievable that so many people have lost a key productivity tool in one day.
Glad I was able to get a sneak peak and installed the 2.0 update last night. My G1 is much snappier and I downloaded some cool Apps. AOL Radio is surprisingly good.
Also, migration from IMAP to my company’s Exchange worked seamlessly. Calendar sync’ing is nice.
iPhone 3G, West Coast (Nor Cal). Installed iTunes 7.7 ok. Connected iPhone:
“We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-4). There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.”
Not “we’re busy” or similiar, just a unknown error. However, since I kept it plugged in and charged I did get a “Welcome to AT&T” text message and changed from No Service to receiving. Can access the AppStore through it via Wi-Fi. Will keep clicking….
@Meg YOU FAIL!
@Paul
If there is a English Dummies app there, you might want to pick up a copy yourself.
It is “There are” and not “they’re”.
Folks who give the “That’s what you get for being an early adopter” crap can keep their zen and tea leaves to themselves. Apple fans are fans because, historically, “It just works.” But the iPhone- both launches- has been a debacle. Either you’re ready to goto market or you’re not. Here’s an idea: make and ship enough of the damned things for demand, get enough bandwidth, run some tests, and do it right. “It just works, ” my butt. I have no phone connectivity in the middle of a business day. And the tatooed-and-ring-nosed kids with their snooty-cool attitudes don’t make your experience any easier.
I kept trying and eventually after 3 hours got through to the store, got my update and disconnected.
http://www.scripting.com/stori.....Apple.html
the cruchgear fix works.
i had to ok out of the error about 4 times and in about 20 mins it connected and went through. the music and videos are currently being restored.
Should have built the AppStore in Rails.
@ryan fail THIS!
Great video John!
Ohhh dudde.. I m so sorry.. Saw your video.. really sorry.. u sound so bad.. u need a lapdance buddy.. i ll pay for it..
let me start a site.. lapdances4sadjohn.com
I upgraded my old iPhone to 2.0. Same problems as everyone else. The amazing thing was that it seemed physically impossible to get up and leave the house to go to work while my iPhone was bricked … amazing …
when techcrunch uses “epic fail” the phrase has jumped the shark.
Most companies would die to have the problem of so much hype, so many purchases on initial release. It is a black eye for Apple in round one, but this is going to be a multi-round event. App store, the dev kit, the power of the OS and multi-touch. History changing IMHO. It really is not a phone anymore. Yeah they got bruised early on, but an Apple win by knock-out (consumer market) is just a round or two away. MSFT execs have been praying they’d have such problems, but it is not to be.
Developers in the App store are going crazy happy right now. Loopt investors orgasmic. Historic I say. Jesus MSFT missed this so big — I know a guy on the mobile team. Sad.
Didn’t you learn anything from last year? Wait in line at the Apple store, not the AT&T store.
Apple, STOP being a control freak!
You just knew that requiring activation in the store would be a mess, especially with lines of people waiting!!!
Ridiculous that they would also offer the 2.0 software to previous owners on the same day.
This is just plain idiotic. Funny that these things happen over and over again and yet they don’t prepare for it.
Thank god they were not trying to break a download record like mozilla did a bit ago - it would have been, for lack of a better phrase, an EPIC FAIL ^ 2.
“I have no phone connectivity in the middle of a business day. And the tatooed-and-ring-nosed kids with their snooty-cool attitudes don’t make your experience any easier.”
Sir you have quite a snooty attitude yourself.
OK I just got in. 12:02 PM. Mine is activated and all set to go.
Hope the queue is clearing up now.
Happy 3Ging folks.
HAVE SOMEONE SEND YOU A TEXT MESSAGE.
I had someone send me a text message and then I was able to use everything.
I still can’t sync or anything, but at least I can make and accept phone calls.