iPhone 6 Pre-Orders Cause Huge Problems For Sprint's Website

The various wireless carriers began taking pre-orders for Apple's new iPhone 6 Friday and heavy demand for the phone left Sprint customers with some major problems.

The carrier began taking orders for the phone overnight, but visitors to its website Friday morning were met with both outages and very slow response times.

At time the site displayed a message saying that the company was working on its store and would soon return to taking pre-orders.

It was possible, as of 11:54 a.m. EST for existing customers to log in and place orders for the new phone, but the Sprint site was loading very slow and visitors received timeout notices.

In some cases, pages simply failed to load. Sprint did direct customers to its stores and its call-in phone number in order to facilitate orders.

The launch of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 plus, which has a larger screen, is expected to be one of, if not the, biggest phone launches in history.

Apple releases a new version of its popular smart phone every September but the two new iPhones are the first to have a screen larger than four inches which is pushing demand higher.