Some Apple fans were finding it hard to make use of their new 3G iPhones on Friday as a flood of shoppers trying to activate their new handsets overwhelmed Apple’s iTunes servers. The overload caused Apple’s iPhone activation process to crash for part of the day, turning thousands of new 3G iPhones into glorified paperweights.

Tech-savvy Apple fans, many of whom waited in line for hours - and in some cases overnight – to get their hands on the 3G iPhone should have seen this coming. It doesn’t take a computer genius to figure out that, with tens of thousands of people queueing up from Tokyo to San Francisco, there was bound to be a crushing load on Apple servers at some point during the day. Read more