Last night was rough for Apple enthusiasts seeking to pre-order the iPhone 6. As we recounted in our Morning Recap, heavy traffic brought down the online Apple Store for almost two hours after pre-orders went live at 12:01 a.m. PST. But apparently plenty of people got through (and it didn’t hurt that the sites for AT&T and Verizon worked fine), as a new report says that last night set a record for iPhone pre-orders.
“Response to iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has been incredible with a record number of preorders overnight,” an unidentified Apple representative said in a statement to Re/code. The rep declined to say exactly how many orders were made.
AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega delivered a similar statement to Fierce Wireless in which he praised the orders but held back from providing any figures aside from a vague “hundreds of thousands” of pre-orders. He did, however, state that the iPhone 6 is already outpacing the demand for the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c from last year.
“It’s amazing to see the volume,” de la Vega said. The response was so amazing, in fact, that the larger iPhone 6 Plus is now listed as sold out for pre-orders for both Apple and all major carriers.
The most impressive numbers should appear after the two versions of the new iPhone go live on Friday, September 19. Last year Apple achieved a record of 9 million iPhones sold in one weekend with the combined 5s and 5c units, and it looks well on path to surpass those numbers a week from now.
The phones will launch next Friday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, and availability in other countries will follow in the weeks and months afterward.
Follow this article’s writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
More: continued here