AT&T Really Blew It This Time

[jaykk]

Apple needs to spend some of their money on Server upgrades. Way back when we could buy millions of songs within a short time span (billion song promotion etc), still Apple can't handle this volume?

I guess iTunes store is powered by Akamai servers where as online store isn't.

 

[jtp098]

Apple needs to spend some of their money on Server upgrades. Way back when we could buy millions of songs within a short time span (billion song promotion etc), still Apple can't handle this volume?

I guess iTunes store is powered by Akamai servers where as online store isn't.

how was it apple's fault it was more att fault then apple. it was the problem of getting our account info from att. not apple!! ahh

 

[jtp098]

+1.

Let's stop blaming AT&T for what's not their fault. I spent an hour trying to pre-order an iPhone 4 on the Apple site, to no avail. That was a little after 1:00 AM PDT, right after they brought the store back online!

I gave up and tried the AT&T site. I got through with no trouble whatsoever. Took me a couple of minutes to complete the process.

A big thumb-down to Apple.

but you get stuck when it is getting the info from att... that is not apples fault. haters

 

[fuzion]

It's ok everyone; please continue to allow those of us whom are tech savvy to explain how it's not like they have one effing server trying to do all the work, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at work here and the demand exceeded it.

Carry on, pointing at AT&T and Apple and remember the internet works in magic unicorn style.

 

[iTiki]

You really can't predict internet traffic, because they had no idea how many of the millions of customers would want to upgrade.

Further...... how do you know there weren't bottlenecks on equipment from your provider enroute to the apple or ATT servers? There was a ******** of traffic in the last 24 hours to AT&T and Apple, equipment gets overwhelmed no matter what. Let's say they prepped for 1 million hits in one hour, what happens when 1 million people each open up 2 instances of the site to try and get in? Bogged down. Now have those people trying to upgrade on both tabs to make sure one of the two gets through.. the eligibility check to the ATT servers are getting hammered more than they need because people are so eager to get it.
It sucks, but there's no epic fail... just a boatload of eager iPhone users.

Sorry, not buying it. Even Big Steve said something to the effect, "this is even bigger than the original iPhone". They knew this was going to be a fiasco and that is exactly what they wanted in order to get all the press. Anything less and the launch would have been a "failure".

 

[iTiki]

It's ok everyone; please continue to allow those of us whom are tech savvy to explain how it's not like they have one effing server trying to do all the work, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at work here and the demand exceeded it.

Carry on, pointing at AT&T and Apple and remember the internet works in magic unicorn style.

I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is they KNEW it would be like this and they are loving it....

 

[fuzion]

Sorry, not buying it. Even Big Steve said something to the effect, "this is even bigger than the original iPhone". They knew this was going to be a fiasco and that is exactly what they wanted in order to get all the press. Anything less and the launch would have been a "failure".

.. and the same thing about the iPad, and the 3GS, and the 3G, and the original iPhone, and the Macbook Air, and the ipod nano, and the............

To go on the it's apple/att's fault side of things, they probably COULD have gone balls out and added who knows how many more servers and pipes to handle a higher load, but it probably wouldn't have been worth it... because face it.. you're going to buy one. If you didn't buy one today, you'll buy one tomorrow. Investing say 100k in technology to meet a 48 hour demand may have had too great of a financial loss to be worth while.

 

[tahoeroscoe]

Does it suck that the servers were overwhelmed? Absolutely.

But... you have to consider the incredible amount of volume an international release like this generates on the servers and connections to the servers. The fact that AT&T and some areas of europe sold out within hours shows you how much volume was generated by this release.

From a business standpoint, people who are determined to pre-order an iphone on launch day are going to buy it regardless of the inconvenience. Just consider all those who wait in lines for hours to pick one up at the store. And it really doesn't make sense to invest multiple millions of dollars in servers for a once a year event.

It's really easy to point fingers and say you guys suck but IMO everyone should have known there would be bottlenecks and some amount of capacity issues.

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

AT&T really fubar'd this one, no doubt, but I get a kick out of the fans who REFUSE to acknowledge just how badly Apple's website behaved today. I've been all the way through their checkout process at least a dozen times today and each time end up with that dumb-azz "OOps, back to square one for you!" error page. That has NOTHING to do with AT&T...that's totally Apple programming faults at work there.

 

[phpmaven]

You really can't predict internet traffic, because they had no idea how many of the millions of customers would want to upgrade.

Further...... how do you know there weren't bottlenecks on equipment from your provider enroute to the apple or ATT servers? There was a ******** of traffic in the last 24 hours to AT&T and Apple, equipment gets overwhelmed no matter what. Let's say they prepped for 1 million hits in one hour, what happens when 1 million people each open up 2 instances of the site to try and get in? Bogged down. Now have those people trying to upgrade on both tabs to make sure one of the two gets through.. the eligibility check to the ATT servers are getting hammered more than they need because people are so eager to get it.

It sucks, but there's no epic fail... just a boatload of eager iPhone users.

If we were talking about Joe's Plumbing Shop here, I would agree with you. But for two companies as massive as Apple and AT&T to have not anticipated a high demand and have the infrastructure in place to handle virtually any amount of visitors coming is ridiculous. I'm not saying that it's the end of the world, but they definitely failed on this occasion to plan ahead.

 

[fuzion]

AT&T really fubar'd this one, no doubt, but I get a kick out of the fans who REFUSE to acknowledge just how badly Apple's website behaved today. I've been all the way through their checkout process at least a dozen times today and each time end up with that dumb-azz "OOps, back to square one for you!" error page. That has NOTHING to do with AT&T...that's totally Apple programming faults at work there.

If it worked 2 days ago it's not the programming. It's the load. There are web servers, database servers, eligibility servers, payment processing servers, etc. It's not all on one system.

A good scenario -

Goto store.apple.com
store.apple.com finds a slave server that isn't busy and sends you there. You click on upgrade an iphone.. Then it pulls up a list of options, you say upgrade, then it asks you for the AT&T account info, the server sends that to AT&T for verification, AT&T says upgrade is eligible at this rate, then then apple server you're hitting has to go and pull your available options from a database. Then you say continue. Then you choose shipping or in store pickup. Then you choose to sign in to itunes or go as a guest. If you sign into itunes thats another request that has to go out and get verified and sent back...blahblahblahblahblahQ&@^&!^&#

To go further.. you put in your zip - Apple has to find your city/state and tax info.. then do a map check to see where the closest store is.. I mean the list goes on and on, so the chances of one of those processes getting bogged down or timed out is more likely to occur when there are millions of people doing the same exact thing as you.


There is a lot of **** going on here.

 

[outphase]

Yeah, I really hate how AT&T wasn't upfront about white iPhones as well! (wait a sec...)

 

[iTiki]

.. and the same thing about the iPad, and the 3GS, and the 3G, and the original iPhone, and the Macbook Air, and the ipod nano, and the............

To go on the it's apple/att's fault side of things, they probably COULD have gone balls out and added who knows how many more servers and pipes to handle a higher load, but it probably wouldn't have been worth it... because face it.. you're going to buy one. If you didn't buy one today, you'll buy one tomorrow. Investing say 100k in technology to meet a 48 hour demand may have had too great of a financial loss to be worth while.

We are on the same side of the fence. What I said in my original rant was that in the end everyone that wants one, will buy it anyway. But you have to admit, they knew and wanted this to be a mess from the beginning. Yes, they could have spent the big bucks and for the most part, dramatically reduced the problem. But why, a feeding frenzy was part of the plan.

 

[dagomike]

Well, I think the order system could certainly be improved on. Maybe a queue system or even reserve time slots. There seemed to be about half dozen points of timeout failure. When people drop out and restart over and over it really cascades out of control quickly.

But we have to wait for the pre-order numbers. If the numbers are astronomical you can't really blame ATT. Even if they doubled their best effort, it would probably still have been problems. It's probably a joke to think Verizon would have done better.

Figure that it took ATT a few days to cut off pre-order last year, and the cut off pre-order within hours. Since Apple opened pre-sales up to RS and BB, you gotta think they have lots of inventory to spread around.

I think the sales are going to be huge and everyone will just nod their heads and say, well that's why.

 

[daihard]

To go on the it's apple/att's fault side of things, they probably COULD have gone balls out and added who knows how many more servers and pipes to handle a higher load, but it probably wouldn't have been worth it... because face it.. you're going to buy one. If you didn't buy one today, you'll buy one tomorrow. Investing say 100k in technology to meet a 48 hour demand may have had too great of a financial loss to be worth while.

To rationalise their decisions not to upgrade their equipment for this couple of days is one thing. From the business standpoint, that probably makes a whole lot of sense. It is quite another for the consumers to be happy about those decisions.

 

[fuzion]

To rationalise their decisions not to upgrade their equipment for this couple of days is one thing. From the business standpoint, that probably makes a whole lot of sense. It is quite another for the consumers to be happy about those decisions.

Lol, I guess i'm just feeling sorry for them because I watch my users login and then BAM OUTLOOK WORD EXCEL ADOBE (... just to HAVE adobe open, not actually using it), IE TO LOAD NEWS SITES, FACEBOOK.......... "WHY IS IT SO SLOW?"

Because your f*#*!#ng computer JUST got to your desktop, the login script is still running, the antivirus is still doing an initial scan.. including all the million things you keep on your desktop.... CALM DOWN!!




(and then there are the curveball users like the one who has been there for YEARS and years before me but last week was opening PDFs in word and couldn't understand why it stopped working suddenly)

 

[mikejfrd]

It was a mess today but I'm sure ATT and Apple will both work hard to get everything straight this week and ready for the 24th. I'm pretty good friends with a store manager and he said that they were going to process most of their pre-orders this evening after everything slows down. They worked hard today give them a break. There are some things that just can't be controlled, like millions of people trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Now iTunes on the 24th may be our next hump

 

[caranddriver]

I blame both companies for not having enough computing resources on hand to handle the traffic.

Same ole story every big launch. It'll only get better when the AT&T monopoly finally dies the death it deserves.

 

[iLoveMyApple]

I'm an Apple fan and I never did get through today. I tried since 1 in the morning! I never had any luck. I'm pretty ticked. Apple and AT&T knew this would happen. Terrible preparation.

 

[pollster25]

bad pr for both AT&T and Apple

I got through the Apple site only to run into a lack of access of my wireless account with AT&T. I could not access my account with AT&T all day - it ant a big deal to anticipate millions purchasing phones in one day - quit making excuses for who ever is the culprit. Someone ought to be fired and named publically as an incompeted moron - bet it won't happen again after a public humilation naming the idiots in charged! Then it will stop!

 

[TheBearman]

I blame both companies for not having enough computing resources on hand to handle the traffic.

It's hard to justify the expense of hardware for what is limited to no more than a few days (CPU time) a year. Having said that both companies need to review their application environment as well as do a better job of capacity planning. Understanding that they are going to be hammered doesn't prevent them for enabling an environment which would allow the completion of a unit of work without failure. As someone already pointed out they had so many points where this failed when they should have really had 1. AT&T and Apple should have worked together to enable a backend communication channel for upgrade eligibility and inventory management.

I deal with environments like this everyday for companies dealing with high traffic levels every day. Some can suffer federal penalties/fines for failure to complete transactions within a specific amount of time.

I know they can't control traffic outside their network and that could have caused some of the problems but controlling traffic once the order process starts is well within their control.

 

[dagomike]

I got through the Apple site only to run into a lack of access of my wireless account with AT&T. I could not access my account with AT&T all day - it ant a big deal to anticipate millions purchasing phones in one day - quit making excuses for who ever is the culprit. Someone ought to be fired and named publically as an incompeted moron - bet it won't happen again after a public humilation naming the idiots in charged! Then it will stop!

It's sold out.

It's all moot because all that will be reported/remember is it's a runaway hit. Those who got in will be the lucky ones and they will be happy to have had the privilege.

 

[pkirby11]

Does anyone else think that today was just another nail in AT&T's coffin? I mean they just messed up Apple's usually spotless record and they made Apple's own website mess up. First the network issues and now this, At&t exclusive cant last much longer.

It's no ones fault. Do you understand how websites and servers work? Do you really think that ATT and Apple could have upgraded their servers to handle the massive and I mean massive rush that was the iPhone 4 pre-order? Why is it when something like this happens we instantly blame the companies. I would imagine at least 2 million people beat both Apple and ATT's servers to death today, I'm sorry I see no fault in either company.

 

[XLR8]

Apple has 34 billion in cash last I heard. There's really no excuse.

 

[zub3qin]

You do realize that neither company has any control over how many people visit their websites, right?

All of these blame threads are ridiculous. The pre-order trouble is coming from an extreme number of people trying to get the phone. It has nothing to do with them being ill-prepared. It could happen to any website.

Umm... wrong. Ebay and Amazon have more people doing transactions on their SLOWEST day than Apple/AT&T did today. Amazon and Ebay can handle the traffic... why not Apple/AT&T?