White iPhone 4 Isn’t Available for Pre-Order, but Apple and AT&T Are Still Brought Down by Demand

Black and white may be nostalgic when it comes to film, photographs and television, but Apple seems to have continued success by keeping the color palette for its products to the perennially popular monochromatic duo. The white iPhone 4 won’t be available for pre-order – and if you remember the stir that Apple caused when it started making the original iPod in black, you’ll know that something as simple as a single non-color can whip enthusiasts into a frenzy. But the limited pre-order availability of the white iPhone 4 hasn’t done anything to dampen demand for the black iPhone 4 which is available for pre-order.

Well, the black iPhone 4 which is available for pre-order in theory. It seems that AT&T’s network has been collapsing under the pressure of pre-order demand all day. Not only collapsing, but sending customers to other subscribers accounts and exposing their information when people are able to log in. D’oh!

Pre-Order Pandemonium

Let’s start with the pre-orders. AT&T has been partnered with Apple for a while. They know the power of the Cupertino marketing machine, and have profited handsomely from it even when times were tough. Somehow, the AT&T order servers weren’t prepared to meet the demand today when customers tried to get in pre-orders through physical stores, the AT&T and Apple websites.

Customers reported everything from pre-orders that took 20 minutes to go through, to timeouts on Apple’s site (which relies on AT&T servers) that never sent orders through, and lines of people standing outside stores which closed down in response to the system failures. For those who did make it through? Cancellation notices, multiple charges and notifications that the phone would be backordered 2-3 weeks. {Gizmodo}

For some of those stores that did stay open to try to field pre-orders, employees eventually brought out old fashioned pen and paper to get credit card imprints. And actually, the information of those people who did complete a written credit card slip may be more secure than those who continued to do battle with AT&T’s kooky ordering system.

Data Breaches: Oops! AT&T Did It Again

Gizmodo reports that at least 3 customers who logged in with their own username and password were taken to a completely different user account, which contains information on addresses, phone calls, bills and lots of other things you probably want to keep between yourself and AT&T.

The worst part of it? An AT&T employee claims the issues are related to network updates done over the weekend that weren’t tested before the pre-order launch.

“Whenever we see people who are logging in and seeing other customer’s account info, it is an issue with the databases that contain customer information. Orders that contain any information like this can cross customer information, and cause a customer be able to see other accounts by logging out and logging back in. This means that when they log in a few times, it gives them different customer account info every time. It’s a rare occurrence, but it has happened in the past,” says the unnamed source. {Gizmodo}

This comes on the heels of another security breach in which hackers discovered a relatively simple way to obtain the email addresses of iPad customers – again, on the back of AT&T’s data storage methods. The weekend update may have been intended to correct that problem, but seems to have opened up many more. For now, AT&T’s solved the problem by completely removing the iPhone eligibility page on their website.

We almost feel sorry for AT&T at this point, but those of you holding out for a Verizon iPhone may be able to take some comfort in knowing that this has to have the people over at 1 Infinite Loop rethinking their exclusive partnership.