Apple’s shiny new iPhone showed off its power to attract hordes of drooling customers before it’s even released earlier today as O2 started taking pre-orders, promising a Friday 11^th delivery.

The operator sent out text messages to punters who had registered an interest in the Apple phone, letting them know that the 3G handset was available to pre-order from 8 am onwards. By 9 am O2.co.uk was reduced to a quivering wreck of groaning servers and bandwidth overloads, spitting out error messages when customers attempted to access it. Functionality was restored briefly, but promptly crashed again. O2 now says it doesn’t have any stock of iPhones left to fill pre-orders for Friday and the best thing for people to do is go in to store or wait until the 10^th.

Apparently over 200,000 people registered interest in the new iPhone in the UK, 165,000 more than the original. Over in the states, AT&T is planning on opening early to fulfil demand. According to spokesperson Cathy Lewandowski, all activation will be handled in store before customers can take their new toys home. Given the braying masses who will no doubt be queuing down the streets and camping out before opening, this process will only complicate the busy first few days, and add valuable minutes onto sales.