UK Service Provider Blames Apple For iPhone Shortage

It looks like pre-orders for would be iPhone owners in the UK aren’t going so well.

Yesterday morning British telecommunications company, O2 UK, sent out emails and text messages to its customers inviting them to pre-order their 3G iPhones prior to the launch this Friday.

Of course, as you’d expect, there was a bit of a rush and the O2 website started to feel the pressure quite early on in the day. By mid-morning customers began to complain that they couldn’t access the site to register for an upgrade. Users who were registering for an iPhone for the first time seemed to have less of a problem. Soon enough reports began to trickle through that O2 was completely sold out of the 16 GB version of the iPhone and only had 8 GB versions left on offer.

One customer emailed O2 and according to the Register was told that the shortage was not O2’s fault but Apple’s. The customer was told that the UK had received a limited number of iPhones because Apple was launching the third generation jesus phone in 22 countries at once. Furthermore the shortage of iPhones in the UK is expected to last for a few weeks following the launch.

As for the website cracking under the pressure ? O2 said the site was dealing with 13,000 orders per second and that the company simply wasn’t ready for such high levels of demand.

O2 split the stock between its online store and its brick and mortar stores, so if you’re still hoping to get your hands on one, make sure you get up extra early on Friday morning.