O2 starts 3G iPhone stampede - and runs away

2 and a half hours later...

and it's finally ordered. What are the chances of getting it on Friday though...

An Absolute Farc-Up

I've been hitting the site for just over 2 hours now (since 9.30) - and have got to the 'choose your phone and tarrif' screen twice and it keeps crashing out.

what an absolute joke - once you get sent the code, they should switch you onto another box instead of continuing to run you on this overloaded server.

very very cross as an upgrade customer!

Carhpne Warehouse

Just in case anyone's wondering - CPW's shop is selling them and seems slightly more stable. Just in case this helps anyone.........

Enough Phones?

Any of you whingers stopped to think that Apple may have given O2 a certain amount of phones for launch and that is it?

And the people who can't upgrade till the end of their contract? read what you sign for godsake, you signed up to your current deal and were happy at the time.

No 16GB?

OK, I saw all the fuss about the site being down and went to look for myself. I thought I was in for a treat, because it was working.

Then I discoverd the lack of 16GB availability. I had to show a lot of restraint to not just make do with an 8GB model.

One possibly worrying (though minor) consideration is O2's statement that the 'black 16GB iPhone' is not available. I was under the impression that the 16GB model was exclusively in white.

Damnit, I want the bragging rights of a white iPhone!

re: safari

wierd - on the macrumours site someone reported that they'd had no luck with Firefox but the first time they tried it on Safari it went straight through without a glitch

i've been reloading and entering my details non-stop now for 4 hours

if the rest of you could just STOP trying to upgrade your iPhones for 10 minutes it'd give me a chance to get my order through the system. thanksverymuchverykindofyou :-) :-)

And they criticise Linux fanboys....

Honestly, O2 are trying to do many of you a favour by making you stop and think before piling yet more of your hard earned onto the collection plate in the church of Apple. Can you really criticise them for this? This fuss makes the linux fanboys and the scientologists look quite rational....

It doesn't work on Safari!

IDIOTS!

It's an APPLE iPhone. APPLE.

You don't think that one or two users might be trying to connect using a Mac?

Browsers?

People who ordered phones today with no problems -- you guys all using Firefox, or IE??

No problems

Got the email at 8:30 this morning. Ordered my 16Gb iphone at 9:10 am this morning without any problems. Roll on Friday - shame I can't just pick it up from a shop to avoid courier problems.

shit shit shit

This is soo bad. Can't buy it instore and the upgrade "site" has blown up so many times with the spinning dots of death...

Try again at 3pm

Nice lady in customer services says the website's titsup and will be rebooted at 3pm. My order got all the way to the end and then I got kicked back to the original page with no comfirmation. Apparently that's quite common.

Update ..

I completed my order just fine at 11.30am ish. Seems to be OK so far. I am a new customer and they didn't ask me for a deposit or anything when I ordered. The only down side is that I have had to end my O2 boycott .... I will miss you Vodafone ..

News just in...

Thousands of mugs who ordered an iPhone the first time around are desperate to shell out more cash for another one.

It's just a phone. Get over it. It's not going to make you better at your sales/marketing job and it's not going to make you able to attract women without the rohitnol you normally rely on. Get back in your BMW M3 and go drink branded spirits in Hoxton.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shoreditch+twat

Debit Card Details

I have now put my debit card details into a form, that every time it appears, is different.

Once I got a proper screen, with select phone, select tariff, since then have just been re-entering into this silly form

Hope to god it hasn't taken million entries x £99!!

Madness I tells ya.

Payment

I just want to check that no money has been taken from my card as I've not been able to get all the way through after putting my card details in?!!

Oh, FFS!

What a POS web app that upgrade site is - not content with sending the stampeding hordes in at the same time ('we're only a comms company, why would we have any expertise in capacity planning'), we're presented with just about the most ungraceful web 2.0 interface ever deployed - the spinny dots of timeout death have no failover OR fallback, so if you are unlucky enough to have a timeout at any point in the ordering process you have to go right back to the start, and get a new upgrade code texted to you! WTF?! This point alone must be doubling or trippling the apparent load on their servers.

PAYG not til Christmas

O2 site says PAYG not until later this year. Carphone warehouse site says not til Christmas. That certainly puts a spanner in the works of my plan to unlock it and use 3's HSDPA for only £5 for unlimited data per month.

No More Pre-Orders?

Just spoke to a lady at o2 who says they have stopped taking pre-orders as the website has stopped functioning, she says she doesn't know when the site will change to reflect this, just that they are looking into it.

As for getting an iPhone now, you just have to ring up on friday with everybody else and just hope that you get through.

Just to confirm she said that they only have limited stock aswell, because apparently they didn't know how many people would want one!

O2 were very surprised at the response

Well, that is what they would have said had I bothered to call them this morning after trying several times to get an order in. What kind of complete numpty thought that there would not be a flood of response to the offer? Did they really just expect a few hundred people to try and buy?

It is things like this, in the beginning of the 21st century, that drive me to complete despair for us all. These captains of industry cannot get the simple things right, yet they expect - and get - huge salaries and bonuses for acts of gross incompetence.

As it happens, I'll be content to sit it out with my iPhone 2G until the hiatus dies down in a few weeks time. Meanwhile I can occupy myself with MobileMe, an altogether much more attractive proposition than the iPhone 3G and with none of the O2 bollocks that we have seen today.

When I can walk into a store and buy one over the counter I will. Until then, you lot, its all yours.

Icon selected sarcastically. Today with O2 certainly was no joke.

Ordered on Carphone Warehouse

Against my better judgement, I just ordered the 16GB iPhone on the £45 tariff from Carphone Warehouse.

Earlier today the website was saying out of stock; the headline was order now, get delivery on Friday, but the small print said "8GB only". Then it changed from "out of stock" to "preorder" and the small print said !8 and 16GB".

So I ordered one. God only knows what will happen next, presumably something will go wrong quite swiftly. O2's systems may have fallen over, but better to not allow orders than to accept thousands that they can't fulfil.

GET IT HERE

http://shop.o2.co.uk

worked first time after spending ALL day on the lousy www.o2.co.uk site

Glenn

You *can* upgrade in-store on Friday

Or at least that's what the central iPhone nicecustomerservicelady told me: http://www.allaboutiphone.net/2008/07/16gb-upgraders-fear-not/

Fingers crossed then.

Out of stock

So they're taking orders again!

I just got "Thank you for your order. We are processing this and will contact you if there are any complications with the details you have provided." from the O2 upgrade site, so they're now happily processing orders for a phone they've run out of.

Excellent :-/

Paris, 'cos I'd rather look at her than an iPhone :)

All gone...

What a waste of a day, i have 9 upgrade numbers on my phone from stupid text messages but that's it...

Shame it was such a mad scramble to get through the damn order process seeing as i've been trying since 9:30 this morning...

Still, i'm sure the service once i get the phone will be top notch! ;)

Same here......

I thought I was the only one with problems.

Got the email at 7:37, tried to order at 8:05am, all the way through to step 5 and submitting the summary and got "Unable to process your order, please phone telesales on blah".

Tried again and got the same thing.

Phoned the number, not open till 8:30 - first bit of great planning.

Phoned the number, got through and spent the next 20 mins on hold whilst the CSR talked to telesales only to come back to me and tell me that because of my circumstances the reason I got that message is because I can't order one until after Friday. All they had was my name - no address/phone number anything. I was phoning from works phone so they didn't have a linking phone number.,

I told him that didn't make sense since the preorder email had gone out this morning, he told me that was what he was told that if that message has come up theres a problem and I'd have to wait until the 11th. He said it was something to do with me being a new customer and not an upgrade.....clueless.

Out of interest, I decided to try a different credit card for the £59 charge, it went through to the mastercard thingy, password in, sorted.

The original card I used doesn't use verified by visa or anything, I phoned the bank and they could see no declined transactions. Definately a problem with O2's payment system.

So I have an order number, the order is in-progress and my credit card balance is showing £59 less available funds. They've taken the money - will find out in the next 24 hours whats happening.

My order number starts 0013 so I wouldn't take too much notice of them at the moment and what they mean in regards to getting your order.

Super.

Not a good day for Akamai either

No it doesn't (resolve to 0.0.0.0). However, it does have a CNAME pointing to akamaiedge.net. I strongly suspect Akamai are not going to be using this as a case study ;-)

Paris 'cos she could run a web site better.

Thwarted at the last post....

I eventually managed to get through to the point where I made the final click to complete my order. Result; order rejected after a credit check. Since I have an income of >£150K, no debts, net worth of ~ £900K, set up the DD from an account with a private bank and tried to use a debit card issued by the same bank to buy the hardware I was more than a bit hacked off. Conclusion: O2 is a synonym for "bunch of stercophagic onanists". Apple's association with them cannot be good for Aplle.

What a c*ck up?!

So I've been tryingto get this damn thing since my text turned up at 7.30.

I go to the 'confirm you address' screen twice and each time it crashed but I did get a 'Thank you for you order... blar, blar blar' on the failover.

Just rang O2 to check it's all good and they tell me sorry, my order didn't go through. I'll have to try my luck on the day at one of their stores.

I'm >that< close to cancelling my O2 contract and buying an LG from Vodafone.

Idiots.

@Cynog

Doubtful that order number you have refers to an exact amount... My order number looks nothing like that :/ It's a number prefixed by "on-00" and is a figure in the millions.

Hmmm

I've noticed that most of the people who have succeeded say they were notified by email, which I think means they are new customers, as I was notified by text to my iphone. Does that mean that most of the stocks/web resources were allocated to new customers, not upgraders?

Hmm, way to keep people loyal o2.

Bastards! Tried for seven hours and now out of stock.....

Really annoyed. But hey I have the last laugh, it may *only* be a 16GB 169pound iPhone for me, but I am responsible for the company contract with o2, last year it was over a quarter mil, this year we'll go to Vodafone.

FU o2.

no more available

just tried once again to discover the following:

"Due to huge demand for iPhone 3G we've run out of stock online.

Come back on 10th July for more information"

http://upgrades.o2.co.uk/maintenance.html

i have iRage now

Bul*s***

Where is O2 when Apple stop holding their hands for launches like this...nowhere if you ask me! This has been the most pathetic product launch I have ever seen. I jumped online at 8.03 to place my order and firstly received a completely different website to the one I got at 10:30 but it didn't matter...both failed and on more than 15 occassions for me between 8.03 and 14:15 when I suddenly noticed a Sold Out maintenance page.

As an existing customer who queued for the first one at the Apple Store, I am pissed off. I asked to be notified when the phone was available for purchase and received the text message at 8:00 this morning. I have tried the entire day and phoned customer services three times who told me there were problems with the site but it will be back up and running around 2pm. Well I don't call a sold out maintenance page "up and running"!

They are also spewing such cr*p now about them not expecting the demand to be so high etc etc. Come on! As other posts have pointed out this is just terrible planning. What makes me more angry is that they aren't pulling phones that were previously allocated to stores to support online orders from existing customers. We are the ambassadors of the iPhone and have been their guinea pigs and this is how O2 is going to treat us?!

I for one hope someone else gets the next exclusivity contract for the UK because for the first time in 4+ years I am very disappointed by O2 and their customer service.

That doesn't scratch the surface

o2's utter incompetence and complacency over this has been truly staggering...absolute bunch of muppets.

Have a look at the o2 forums for a truer picture