iOS 5 upgrade process not as smooth as Apple hoped

Apple’s hotly anticipated mobile OS upgrade, iOS 5, launched Wednesday October 12^th. Unfortunately the launch didn’t go as smoothly as Apple was hoping it would. The sheer volume of users attempting to update their iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches slammed Apple’s servers causing a huge number of people to complain of errors.

Upgrading to iOS 5 should have been a seamless experience. In theory a user simply had to download the newest version of iTunes (10.5) which adds support for iCloud. After that plug in your device and it should find the newest version of iOS download it and upgrade.

A slew of users were reporting that the upgrade process resulted in an error message saying, “An internal error occurred (3200).” Other users reported seeing errors with numbers 3002, 3004, and in the case of the iPad sometimes 1600. The 3200 error became so prevalent that “error 3200” was trending on Twitter.

The mass speculation about these error messages were that Apple’s servers simply could not handle the load of so many people trying to upgrade at the same time. Gizmodo offered a workaround that helped some users at least get the newest version of the iPhone software onto their computer and loaded onto their device. The issue of authentication with Apple’s server however could not be resolved by that workaround so many continued to have trouble getting the new software up and running.

To make matters even worse Apple pushed out a massive update for OS X Lion, numbered 10.7.2, which addressed a slew of security issues as well as brought support for iCloud to computers. Snow Leopard also saw a Security Update addressing similar issues. Safari got an update addressing approximately 43 vulnerabilities, AppleTV got a software update with 8 fixes, Numbers and Pages for iOS 5 got fixes as well.

The security vulnerabilities that were plugged up in these updates were not insignificant especially in the case of Safari. One of the more notable fixes was the .dmg and .pkg files are no longer considered “safe” file types. This means Safari won’t open them be default.

Perhaps it would have made sense to space all of these software updates out so that Apple’s servers didn’t get completely hammered. I understand the concept of making a set launch date however the security updates for OS X and Safari seem far more vital than the new features introduced by iOS 5. With the iPhone 4S not releasing until October 14^th, Apple could have pushed out the security updates immediately and pushed back the launch of iOS 5 a bit to give their servers a break. Pushing back the iOS 5 launch may not have mitigated the authentication issues but it surely didn’t help to have a large OS X update pushed out in a similar timeframe.

Did you get your device updated to iOS 5? I’m still waiting to upgrade my iPad until after the 4S launches and the madness dies down. Let us know how your update process went in the comments.