Another midnight iPhone pre-order fiasco

With the fifth iPhone launch looming, you'd think that five years would be enough time for major companies like Apple and AT&T to get this stuff working. You'd think. Unfortunately, when the iPhone 4S pre-orders were supposed to start at 12:01am PDT today, it took about 40 minutes before Apple's online store came back online, and things quickly went downhill from there. While Verizon customers seemed to be able to make purchases with ease, and even Sprint's site held up well despite some slowness, AT&T's systems continually crashed and burned until Apple threw in the towel and implemented a reservation system two hours later so that people could reserve a device and get to bed, coming back later to complete the transaction.

Here's looking to next year's improvements...we hope!