The big day has finally come. You rushed to download iPhone OS 3.0, sat on the edge of your seat as your handset did its thing, and then.. nothing. No glorious homescreen, no new search pane. You look over at your monitor, and sure enough – iTunes is spitting out error messages.
Fear not, though. If you’re getting activation errors or having a hard time connecting to iTunes, you’re by no means alone. Give it a few minutes and try again or, as I imagine most people are doing, just sit there and try over and over again until it works. It took about 8 tries to get ours activated and running after updating to the final 3.0 build (which, by the way, is 7A341 – just like last week’s developer release. If you updated to the most recent developer build, you don’t need to update again.)
While it’s somewhat reasonable to expect the servers to strain under the pressure of many thousands of people all trying to download hundreds of megabytes each, it’s still quite unfortunate. For plenty of users, the mobile has replaced the landline; however it takes for them to get activated, that’s how long they’re detached from the world. When a release goes live in the middle of a work day, that can be bad news.
I downloaded it as soon as it was available and got it activated really quick. Luckily I wasn’t in the dust for about 6 hours like last year’s 2.0 release.
Lucky you!!
Here is a workaround I found for the “The iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable” error: http://pineappleorange.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/getting-past-the-activation-server-is-temporarily-unavailable-iphone-update-error/
I’m lucky, i got it on the first try. I rushed to download it as soon as iPhoneclub (Dutch iPhone site, i’m Dutch) tweeted the update.
If that does not work back and do a recovery! :-) Backup, download update, turn off phone, hold power+home for 10sec then let go of power while still holding home for a further 10 sec’s. iPhone should now be detected are you are prompted if you would like to do a recovery. Hello iPhone 3.0.
I knew it that you guys here would have an answer for the activation server crash!
I just kept trying and in three clicks it’s updating as I type. Sweeeet!
This usually happens when thousands of people are trying to squeeze into a room meant for hundreds.
This would not happen if they would have used a robust content delivery network like Limelight Networks to store these files on their edge servers. Very armature apple. Get with the program.