SINGAPORE — Faced with “technical issues”, Singtel had to stop taking reservations for the Apple’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus on Wednesday (Sept 14) afternoon just some 30 minutes after launching its pre-orders.

Minutes after Singtel launched pre-orders at 3pm, customers started complaining about unresponsive webpages. On Singtel’s Facebook page, outraged customers said they had been directed to a white screen, while others complained that stocks were sold out even before pre-orders were supposed to have opened.

Singtel replied that it was “experiencing some technical issues” on its reservation site. “We will be pausing reservations until the technical issues are resolved and will resume at 5pm.”

“According to our system, no one has been able to complete their reservation or secure any handset,” the telco said on its website.

At 5pm, Singtel further updated that reservations would be further delayed to Thursday, 10am. "Our technical team are still working on resolving the issue and we are unable to restart reservations today as planned," it said on Facebook. 

Meanwhile, customers of the other two telcos — StarHub and M1 — had also experienced similar technical issues while pre-ordering the new iPhones earlier this week. 

On Tuesday, StarHub customers said they were unable to reserve the phones, even at their allocated appointment time. The issue persisted throughout the day, with some experiencing system errors as well.

Some had to reload the webpage, but were told the models they wanted were already sold out. 

Some M1 customers said the information for pre-ordering was not sent out all at once. One customer said she received her invitation more than 10 hours after other customers.  In 2014, M1 had to suspend pre-orders for the iPhone 6 after discovering a potential security breach on its website.