NEW YORK — The launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new iPhone turned into an information-technology meltdown Friday, as customers were unable to get their phones working.
“It’s such grief and aggravation,” said Frederick Smalls, an insurance broker in Whitman, Mass., after spending two hours on the phone with Apple and AT&T Inc. trying to get his iPhone 3G to work.
In stores, people waited at counters to get the phones activated, as lines built behind them.
Many of the customers had already camped out for several hours in line to become among the first with the new phone, which updates the one launched a year ago by speeding up Internet access and adding a navigation chip.
A spokesman for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., said there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in stores, as planned.
Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, said spokesman Michael Coe. However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls.
“It’s a mess,” said freelance photographer Giovanni Cipriano, who updated his first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.
The new phone went on sale in 21 countries Friday.
