Verizon web site suffers outages after Apple iPhone announcement on Tuesday

The announcement yesterday of the upcoming Verizon variant of the Apple iPhone 4 sent a huge wave of online viewers surfing toward Verizon's web site. Reminiscent to what happened last year to AT&T's site on the day that pre-orders began for the iPhone 4, Verizon's servers were swamped causing an outage.

One person who kept trying to access the site continued to receive a message that read, "Safari can’t open the page because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again." If Big Red's site couldn't handle the traffic from the announcement, imagine what might occur on February 3rd when the carrier will begin taking pre-orders for the long-awaited CDMA version of Apple's touchscreen device. If what happened to AT&T is any guide, Verizon might have a hard time satisfying everyone who wants to pre-order the Verizon iPhone. The device will be released on February 10th and customers of the nation's largest carrier have been waiting a long time for this phone. While some Verizon account holders might have had their dream of owning a Verizon branded iPhone satisfied by the purchase of some of Big Red's Android models, there still is a huge pent up demand from other Verizon customers, unhappy AT&T iPhone users and others.

Last June, AT&T's web site was hit with ten times the previous year's pre-order traffic and the carrier temporarily suspended taking pre-orders, but not before a record amount of units had been reserved for the first day of taking orders . As we reported, another problem occurred when some AT&T customers, trying to log in to their account to see if they were eligible to upgrade to the iPhone 4, ended up viewing the records of complete strangers.

source: AppleInsider