iPhone Activation Servers Crumble Under The Weight Of iOS 7

Happy iOS 7 day! Except for me. And legions of other iPhone owners who, for various reasons, had to activate their iPhone in the iOS 7 install process. Our phones are stuck in iOS 7 activation limbo.

Since early this morning, the activation servers are either down or very slow to respond, essentially rendering the phones useless and stuck in the install process. The situation is so bad, Apple reportedly issued an internal high-priority alert, notifying employees of the server issues that are preventing iPhone activation.

Apple better get its servers in line by Friday. There will be millions of new iPhones wanting to be activated.

In a perfect world, upgrading to iOS 7 would not require activation. However, if the install process fails, the best option is to restore to factory settings, which requires reactivating the phone. Or, perhaps, an owner decided it was a good time to do a fresh install, whipping the phone completely and starting fresh.

Or perhaps someone somewhere made a bad choice and bought a new iPhone today and needed to activate it.

Whatever the case, as noted by Apple’s internal memo and approximately a gazillion tweets, Apple’s iPhone activation servers are currently unresponsive for a lot of iPhone owners.