iPhone 3.0 Update – “Slide For Emergency”

Like probably 10 million others, I updated my iPhone today to the new 3.0 software. The download and process was pretty fast, but getting my phone back to life still hasn’t happened yet.

The symptoms
- Your iPhone displays “slide for emergency” message and only allows emergency phone calls.
- Your phone no longer drops down for options in iTunes
- You see the following error when you connect the phone:

The cause
It would appear that the iTunes store is just overloaded. I’m only speculating here, but I imagine the connection to the iTunes store is to validate and update any apps you’ve purchased and downloaded. If iTunes needs to re-download any apps for any reason, you can imagine the rush on the iTunes servers with everyone upgrading all at once. This looks like something Apple may have overlooked.

The solution
If this is, in fact, an issue of Apples iTunes store servers simply being overloaded, the solution will be to just wait. Unfortunately, those of us with now “bricked” iPhones are left without service while we wait for Apple to fix the problem or for the swarm of requests to Apple’s servers to die down. Either way, it feels like incredibly bad planning on Apple’s part. To get it to come back to life, just repeat the following process until it works:
- dismiss the error message
- eject (See the second update below first)
- unplug
- plug back in

The most frustrating part is that I can’t use the phone at all now. I’d be ok with not getting to some of my apps for a while, but this is just crippling.

UPDATE: After following the above process a few more times, it came back to life quickly. If your iPhone still doesn’t work, just keep trying the above and it should be back in no time.

UPDATE 2: While linking back to this post, Mashable pointed out that there’s another way to force iTunes to try again and again. Just click the iTunes Store and then click the phone again. My process worked for me, but Mashable points out that it comes with the risk of data loss. I partly assumed that everyone does a backup first. In any case, keep that in mind.