AT&T just issued a statement addressing the massive iPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday. The company said that sales of the iPhone 4 were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year.
AT&T also said that they are suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders they’ve already received. At&T wil resume taking pre-orders when they get more inventory from Apple. Yesterday’s chaos also brought more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website to determine if users were able to upgrade to the new phone, which was about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.
The Apple Online Store is out of the devices as well. They’ll still let you pre-order one, but you won’t be getting it on June 24 (launch day). Instead, Apple is saying the next batch of phones will ship by July 2.
This huge numbers of pre-orders and traffic also brought massive failures in Apple’s and AT&T’s system that prevented people from completing their orders. Both systems seem to be resolved now.
UPDATE – Apple apologized too, said they got 600,000 pre-orders.