Scaling online services just seems to be something that people underestimate or just keep doing wrong. Maybe after the iPhone 2.0 upagrade-gate fiasco Twitter can get a few days out of the sunshine.
Apple and AT&T stores are having problems today activating new iPhone 3Gs — with it taking hours in some cases — and the issue is actually all the people at home trying to update their own firmware on their existing phones.
So How Did This Happen:
The source of the iTunes crash/slowdown seems not be those buying iPhone 3Gs from Apple/AT&T stores at all but the millions of people updating to the new firmware at home. Firmware 2.0 isn’t like other firmwares in that it needs to update the phone and reauthenticate the service. And in turn, when the servers are slammed and the phone reaches for reauthentication, the server isn’t always there to reactivate the service. This is how some of those newly bricked iPhones are occurring, and a source tells us that even first gen iPhones are susceptible.
This problem could have easily been avoided.
a) Why is this firmware update requiring the re-authentication? I would guess the re-authentication after the firmware update is being done because Apple and AT&T are overly paranoid about unlocked phones and trying to put in ever more clever things to stop the practice. It’s really a waste of time for Apple to focus on unlocked phones and the proof is that the 2.0 firmware is already jailbroken.
b) Evidently Apple needs to look at how they manage their services and how they distribute geographic access for those services. The activation service probably was getting increasingly hit as people woke up this morning and fired up their home computer to get that new iPhone 2.0 firmware before they went to work. Given Apple has some clue to where they have customers they should have been able to better anticipate the early peak demand.
I am happily running the 2.0 software because I loaded it up last night, but even then it was a long process that took a good 30 minutes.
Let’s hope Apple and AT&T learn from this and do a lot better next time.
Posted by shanepearson 
