Six million iBricks… and growing

Well this is a fine kettle of fish. iPhone activations have essentially gone down and everyone – from folks updating their old phones to new 3G activators – are stuck with bricks until traffic dies off. Reader Brent reports:

Hey Just a heads up…my iPhone, and looking at their forums, everyone else’s iPhones are bricks because the last step of their update process is to connect to the App store which can’t handle the traffic of people updating…looks like everyone is just in a holding pattern with bricked phones until the traffic goes down…wonder how many users are effected…their are a lot of pissed people, including me and apple says, do not disconnect or try to reboot the phone and keep trying until it works…this means everyone with an iPhone is either out of a phone today or has to sit home and keep trying to connect…fun stuff

What is happening is that users are trying to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware and then when the system tries to activate their phones they go into a reboot or restore more, thereby disabling the phone and forcing another update and, with the current traffic, causing the system to fail again.

Our own Peter’s Ha’s 2G is bricked right now as well. Do not update.

Update: A possible fix.
Scott writes:

Hey, I’m sure you know that a lot of people are having problems with the 2.0 update. I have a solution for what seems to be the most common…the “accessing iTunes” problem.

DO NOT disconnect your phone. Instead, when you get the message saying it timed out, click ok. Then click on any other heading, Music for example, in your itunes. Then go back and click on your iPhone icon.

Keep doing this repeatedly to keep your place in line.


Update 2
: A temporary fix.
Ankit writes:

If someone sends you a text message, you can get past the emergency call
screen. It will let you make/receive calls, view the app store, etc. however
you still can’t sync. It’s not an entire fix, but better than nothing.