iTunes gets overwhelmed

APPLE'S iTunes digital joke box has been slowed to a crawl as countless iPod buyers try to cash in their gift certificates.

Apparently any new iPod owners' introduction to the dizzy world of iTunes includes error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads. That is, those who can even get into the iTunes store at all.

Online market researcher Hitwise said that the iTunes site had more than four times the usual amount of traffic, which appeared enough to knock it over completely.

Apple has not been around for a quote, but following its normal policy it would probably tell us that only a small number have been affected.

Dan Frakes, Macworld's senior editor admitted that he and some colleagues were unable to access the iTunes store or received error messages and had to wait two days.

However, he advised his readers that it was really no problem that their favourite company had not designed enough latency in the network. Apple apparently does this to its users every holiday but none of them mind.

He told playfuls.com that 364 days of the year iTunes works fine, but you had tens of thousands of people who just got new iPods, all trying to connect to the iTunes store and download songs at the same time something was going to go wrong.

His advice was to rip CDs from your own collection now and wait a few days to download from iTunes.

So it seems that Apple's virtual monopoly on online music is working out much better than Microsoft's one on operating systems eh Dan?

More here and here. µ