The Verizon iPhone was finally made available very early this morning – at 3:00 a.m. EST, in fact -- but for some who stayed up late (or woke up early) to take the plunge were left unsatisfied when they experienced ordering delays on Verizon’s website servers.
However, Verizon is calling these issues “account-specific.”
“The system performed beautifully through the night, but most people that received error messages had to do with their individual account,” said Brenda Raney, a spokesperson for Verizon.
“For Verizon, if you are on a family plan and the account is not in your name, you may have received an error message while trying to preorder the Verizon iPhone, Raney added.
Verizon said it will change the verbiage on the site to make the process more clear to customers. Although this was the most common reason for errors on the site, Raney said other issues occurred, but were still account-related.
“It’s important to note that the issues only affected a small amount of people,” Raney said.
However, the early-morning problems left some eager Verizon subscribers feeling frustrated. Many took to their Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the news.
“Dear Verizon: You have the worst customer service/website ever! It took me 4.5 hours to pre-order my iPhone,” said one Verizon customer in a Facebook post.
Verizon said they will reach out to everyone who experienced difficulties to make sure their orders are placed.
“We want everyone who wants to preorder a Verizon iPhone [to be able to] do so,” Raney said. “Anyone who had problems on the site should contact us directly and we’ll try to get everything resolved quickly.”
As expected, Verizon said it experienced a lot of traffic right out of the gate, but didn’t reveal how many orders were placed.
“We planned for a lot of traffic and high use on the site, and that is exactly what we got,” Raney said. “It was nothing we couldn’t manage.”
Raney noted that there was a high-traffic spike early on after the 3:00 a.m. EST, but it eventually leveled off through the night.
“As people started to wake up, though, more orders were placed,” Raney added. “We are expecting more and more as the days go on.”
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