Funny, I started with the app store app. It would never load. I would force close it and open it again but all I would get is the message saying to check back. I also kept refreshing the website on my phone in Safari. Eventually, around 15 minutes after preorders started, the app finally loaded. When contacting my carrier, the app kept receiving an error. I kept pressing retry for a few minutes before giving up and getting on my PC.
Guess what. The process went smoothly on my PC and I was able to finalize my purchase. In my case, using the app store app was a failure. I wasn't able to get the site to load on my PC until around 15 minutes after it started as well. I was sitting at my PC, refreshing both my phone and PC until one of them loaded. The server became available on both devices at the same time, but I chose to use the app store app since it already knew my phone info. Like I said, this ended up being a dead end because it couldn't reach AT&T. However, I was able to successfully place my order using my PC.
How can you people who were lucky enough to be able to quickly access the store act all smug and talk like everyone else who did the exact same thing as you did were just ignorant/uninformed??? You're being ridiculous. Some people just couldn't get through to the server for 15 to 20 minutes. Unfortunately, it only took 15 minutes for the more popular options to sell out for launch day.