Ah, AT&T.
So, I’m sitting here staring at my shiny new iPhone 4S. It’s unusable right now, thanks to AT&T’s lack of preparedness. They’ve had several years to figure out how to handle the spike in the load on their servers that accompanies the launch of a new iPhone model. Yet they still manage to hack up a hairball when it comes time to process orders and activate phones.
Apparently, I’m not the only one, either. Several blogs are reporting AT&T customers are experiencing widespread problems with activations. When AT&T carried the iPhone exclusively, I could at least understand that they may have felt that they could get away with inconveniencing their customers. If you wanted an iPhone, there was nowhere else to go. Well, that ain’t the case anymore, AT&T. Time to do a better job serving your loyal customers. Loyalty can be earned, but it can also be lost.
At least Apple had a backup plan when AT&T’s servers could not handle the load the night preorders started. Maybe next year Apple should just go straight to the reservation system they used as a backup and bypass checking the account status for AT&T customers until later. It would have saved me at least an hour trying to get through the ordering process last week.