Shortly before Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S, the company's Web site went down.
People quickly took to Twitter to vent their frustrations about the crash around 12:45 p.m. EDT today, although that may have been due to Apple's tradition of shutting down its online store when it announces new hardware until the announcement is made public. At 3:45 p.m. some users reported that the site was back up, although many users were still receiving Access Denied messages for Apple.com and Apple.com/iphone.
Early this afternoon, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S , a 3G smartphone designed to run applications faster than its predecessor, the iPhone 4. Excitement has been building over the past week for the iPhone announcement with people clamoring online for the latest information about the new device.
However, many users were frustrated to not be able to get onto the official Apple Web site. Around 3:30 today, the phrase "access denied" was trending on Twitter , along with "iphone4s" and "4GS."
At mid-day, Keynote Internet monitoring service said it had been monitoring serious issues with Apple's website and said it had gone down completely and continued to experience severe and intermittent performance issues.
The site appeared to be back up around 4 p.m.
On Twitter, drakemac wrote, "apple.com goes boom! Site is down," while montymetzger tweeted, "Apple.com is down, "access denied" error message. Meanwhile, "access denied" is trending on Twitter, and someone at Apple is getting fired." A tweeter names lexfri noted how bad the timing was for Apple to crash today. "Oof, how embarrassing for Apple: The Apple Store webpage is down, on today of all days," he tweeted.
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com .
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