O2 botch iPhone 3G upgrade release
O2 are anticipating long queues at stores this Friday as the iPhone 3G is launched in the UK. To help reduce congestion existing iPhone customers are being forced to place their order online rather than come into store on the day.
This morning O2 users that had signed up to be notified when they could order their upgrade received a text message advising orders could be made from 8am today. The problem is O2 upgrade site couldn’t handle the demand and soon fell over and now there is only a maintenance page.
O2’s response when questioned about it was that the site went down due to “high demand”. Where they not expecting high demand? There will be very few iPhone owners not looking to upgrade to the 3G so they have to have expected a large number of people ordering. However, despite this rather than set up a robust site to handle the many orders the site was hosted in the US and they used a flash interface with frames!
Many users will not even have seen the flash interface as it often timed out and failed over to a HTML form that could not be processed by the back end system. I personally tried the form 4-5 times and the Flash interface I managed to get 2- stages in before it failed too. O2 eventually put an end to users misery by putting up a maintenance page.
Did they offer telephone orders to compensate for their lack of a site? No - infact the upgrades option on their phone system has been disabled and their sales team have been told they cannot take iPhone upgrade orders over the phone.
It’s embarassing for O2 and for Apple that they do not have the infrastructure to handle a big launch like this. Lets hope that Friday’s new customer release will be handled better. I suspect the majority of the demand for the phones will come for Apple fans who will already have an iPhone rather from the new user but we will see by this time next week.
4 Responses to “O2 botch iPhone 3G upgrade release”
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Site is back up but has the same issues. Sending card details 20 times like this has to be a security risk.
My bad it’s not flash it’s ajax but it still runs incredibly slow and falls over repeatedly.
All O2 needed was a simple form and send and receive a few kb of data. But they had to go for a fancy graphical interface and a budget server.
I wonder if anyone got their order in?
[...] Steve Anderson wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe problem is O2 upgrade site couldn’t handle the demand and soon fell over and now there is only a maintenance page. O2’s response when questioned about it was that the site went down due to “high demand”. Where they not expecting … [...]