Yesterday saw the start of pre orders for Apple's new iPhone here in the UK. Unfortunately for all Apple are reverting to a traditional phone sales model, subsidised by carried and therefore are unable to sell the phones themselves. This means that O2 had to step up and handle the hoards of Apple fanboys (myself included) trying to upgrade to the new 3G version, as well as all the new customers previously put off by the high price.
O2 had an early sign up for, to register interest, which seemed to work fine. On Monday morning all hopefulls got their text message from O2, informing them they could now upgrade on the site.
This promptly caused the O2 servers at http://upgrades.o2.co.uk to fail and revert to a failover server http://upgrades.o2.co.uk/failover/index.html which had an HTML form, that submitted to nothing. The whole process was so badly coded anyway that O2 had to advise in their email not to try upgrading on your iPhone!!! Something I am sure Apple wouldn't be too happy about.
The site was down all day, with the only sniff of a working site being the start that aloud you to enter you number for an upgrade code (of which I got 4), but by the time you got your upgrade text, the site was down again.
Annoyingly all the new customers (new to O2, as existing non iPhone 02 customers had to use the same site) were registering no problem over at shop.o2.co.uk, which didn't even appear to be straining under the pressure. This prompted a lot of speculation that O2 were more than happy to let existing customers (in the "keep net" so to speak) wait until they get the a second batch in.
This rumour was strengthened by the fact the O2 automated phone system was disconnecting users choosing to upgrade over the phone, and when I managed to get through to someone by navigating the, "press 1 for dissconnect upgrades" mine filed. They told me you could only fail to upgrade through the website. The woman on the phone said it was working fine for them, however she refused to enter my information for me... convenient!
Apple will be interested to read the comments of unhappy customer over at Engadget. Fingers crossed they will have some at the 02 stores come Friday morning!