Apple should have announced that Pre-orders would go live on Friday 12th. No mention of time. They could update the site so that it doesn't say we'll be back and the iPhone part of the store just goes live instead of coming soon.
Then they could have turned the phone orders on at 6:47am for the iPhone 6 and 6:55am for the iPhone 6 Plus and instructed the carriers to do the same or simply make them wait for the go ahead. Without prior knowledge, people wouldn't be attacking the servers at 12:01am and the lottery would be based on if you got lucky to check at the right time or heard that orders were finally live.
Instead they seem to have abandoned the website in favor of the Apple Store app and given the carriers no Plus models in the initial batch. And still availability of any of the configs is randomly available or unavailable in the app.
Then they could have turned the phone orders on at 6:47am for the iPhone 6 and 6:55am for the iPhone 6 Plus and instructed the carriers to do the same or simply make them wait for the go ahead. Without prior knowledge, people wouldn't be attacking the servers at 12:01am and the lottery would be based on if you got lucky to check at the right time or heard that orders were finally live.
Instead they seem to have abandoned the website in favor of the Apple Store app and given the carriers no Plus models in the initial batch. And still availability of any of the configs is randomly available or unavailable in the app.