Retailers have long experienced the pains of high demand during the holidays for their products.  They do everything in their power to stock up and provide just enough product to sell to every single buying consumer that walks through the door.

Apple’s iTunes Store however experienced a different type of stockout problem over Christmas.  They stocked out of bandwidth as they experienced a surge of download requests from new iPod users that have recently converted to the the iPod players.

For these new converts their out of the box experience may have been somewhat diminished by the surge in downloaders visiting the site coupled with the poor state of the internet following the communications disruptions in Asia that resulted in a significant amount of rerouting of internet surfers as people and companies attempted to run backup plans to maintain their world wide access to the web.

Not to mention Apple has been distracted this fall by an SEC probe into alleged stock options backdating that could result in a criminal prosecution of the company or of individuals in the ranks at Apple.  This stockout of bandwidth may have occurred in something less than a perfect storm of problems for Apple, but at the end of the day it will prove to be an area that should be improved in the future regardless of the excuse and cause.

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