So, some of you unlucky ones like me had everything prepared, but was unable to access the store (app or website) until as late as 12:20am PST; completely missing their chances at getting the phone within 2-3 weeks despite being prepared.
As a software engineer, while I don't work for Apple, I suspect the cause of this was an issue with cache invalidation on some of the edge nodes. The architecture of websites that need to handle a lot of visitors generally involves a load balancer. You access apple.com (whether through the browser or the app), the load balancer dispatches you to a node in the cluster. Since the node stores some session data about you, you generally become "locked into" that node for the session. This is known as 'sticky sessions' or 'session affinity'.
This means that if you were stuck on one of the nodes there were broken, you unfortunately had no resource because you've already been 'stuck' to that node, and refreshing still gives you the same broken node.
Potential fix for next time:Try clearing your cookies in the browser if the store is still down a minute after the official launch time. You should get a new node, hopefully one with the latest data/
Meanwhile, I'm literally fuming. Time to literally camp out the apple store - I have seen lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside my Apple store today already.
As a software engineer, while I don't work for Apple, I suspect the cause of this was an issue with cache invalidation on some of the edge nodes. The architecture of websites that need to handle a lot of visitors generally involves a load balancer. You access apple.com (whether through the browser or the app), the load balancer dispatches you to a node in the cluster. Since the node stores some session data about you, you generally become "locked into" that node for the session. This is known as 'sticky sessions' or 'session affinity'.
This means that if you were stuck on one of the nodes there were broken, you unfortunately had no resource because you've already been 'stuck' to that node, and refreshing still gives you the same broken node.
Potential fix for next time:Try clearing your cookies in the browser if the store is still down a minute after the official launch time. You should get a new node, hopefully one with the latest data/
Meanwhile, I'm literally fuming. Time to literally camp out the apple store - I have seen lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside my Apple store today already.