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iPhone 4 Pre-Order Debacle Just Another Embarrassment for AT&T

by Terrence O'Brien on June 16, 2010 at 01:25 PM

iPhone Pre-Order Fail
AT&T just can't catch a break. For quite some time, the company has been a media whipping boy due to its lackluster service in cities like San Francisco and New York. Then, a group of hackers, under the guise of Goatse Security, snatched the e-mail addresses and ID numbers of over 100,000 iPad 3G owners, including high-profile customers like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg. Still more recently, the launch of the iPhone 4, which should have been an opportunity for AT&T to bask in a rare success, has become yet another embarrassing chapter in the carrier's history.

Not only has the overwhelming demand taken out the AT&T servers, but it also seems that, even when customers have been able to access the site, there's a good chance they aren't accessing their own accounts. Yesterday, reports from around the Web claimed that many AT&T customers who were attempting to pre-order the iPhone 4 were presented with information for someone else when they logged into their accounts. The security breach exposed the address, phone numbers and bills of those other customers.

AT&T said yesterday that it was looking into the issue after receiving reports, but had so far been unable to replicate the problem. An inside source reported to Gizmodo, however, that the problem may lie within a new fraud prevention system that was not properly tested in advance of the iPhone's launch. Considering the company's rather poor track record, we can only assume that AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega must have some rather compromising pictures of Steve Jobs. [From: Gizmodo, via: Engadget]

Tags: apple, apple iphone, AppleIphone, att, cellphones, fail, iphone, iphone 4, iphone preorder, Iphone4, IphonePreorder, privacy, security, smartphones, top

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