Many iPhone users are finding they can’t finish their upgrade to iOS 5, and speculation is that the Apple servers handling the downloads are overwhelmed by the demand.
By late afternoon Wednesday, a discussion thread at a MacRumors.com forum about this problem had generated over 90,000 views. Most are reporting getting an “internal error” message with the ID 3200.
As of last evening, Apple had not issued any statement, nor responded to a request for information about the upgrade failures.
Most of those posting in the thread echoed a post by dylanursula, “I have successfully downloaded the iPhone ios5 update for my ip4 [iPhone 4]. However after backing up my iphone and extracting the software it gives a 3200 error – any thoughts on fixing it?
So far there aren’t many thoughts. TheNextWeb.com cited a tweet by Jay Freeman, an iPhone jailbreaker better known as Saurik and founder of the Cydia app store serving jailbroken iPhones who claims, “Apple’s servers are swamped, and failing half the requests.” According to the TNW post, many users finally succeed after repeated attempts.
The disappointment and frustration were almost palpable, distilled in simple text. “this is stupid,” posted Phone4UK, at MacRumors.
“So after wasting 30 plus minutes downloading the update and backing up my phone, I have to do it all over again thanks to this error? Really?” snarled Alonzo84.
Others described the upgrade process as “buggy.” At a iOS community forum at Verizon Wireless, Luzaire wrote about the complications: “The download was fast (fast wired internet) but the install was long and buggy. For some reason many of my apps didn’t show up after the initial install and my music/podcasts/videos were all missing.”
What this user discovered was that the “phone had a large block of memory reserved (listed as OTHER) after the initial install. I did a sync without music to get the missing apps back on the phone, put the missing apps back in their proper folders, then synced one more time to put my music/podcasts/videos back on the phone. All was fixed!”
Some of the solutions just seemed random. “was trying to fix this problem for like an hour.. until i rebooted my phone and tried again… and it worked.. try rebooting your phone!” suggested ac425 at MacRumors.
Others counseled persistence and patience. “Friend just called…. Said his had 3200 error kept trying and eventually worked…” posted triggywiggy. “So it’s just servers… Keep trying and it will get through.”
John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for Network World.Connect with him through Twitter http://twitter.com/johnwcoxnww, and his blog RSS feed: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/2989/feed
