Many Verizon customers were disappointed because they weren’t able to pre-order their Iphone4 on February 3.  The reason for this? Verizon simply sold out in less than a day. The company’s website reads,

“We are no longer taking pre-sale orders, experience yours when it’s available online and in stores.” The Iphone 4 will be available online February 9 at 3:01 am and in stores at 7 am on February 10. The price starts at $199 for 16GB with a two year contract, the site reads.

The pre-sale orders began at 3 am on February 3 rd and reportedly lasted about 17 hours total before Verizon maxed out, according to digitaltrends. Whether the pre-sale stopped because of actual shortages or just to get the media talking is not yet clear, because the company didn’t release the number of phones that would be available for pre-orders.  However according to Apple numbers, 2 million CDMA Iphone 4 units were allocated for Verizon Wireless, according to Apple Insider.

However, it does seem that Verizon was afraid of not having enough Iphones for clients, and requested that Verizon employees wait to get their own for the “time being,” in an effort to “meet our customers’ needs in the midst of what will surely be unprecedented customer demand,” according to an internal company memo. Digitaltrends also thinks that this could have been another marketing strategy.

The Verizon website crashed repeatedly Wednesday as customers were trying to put in their orders. According to TGDaily, this is not surprising and the same thing happened on AT&T’s website when it launched the Iphone and saw its website crashed within minutes and its supply of Iphones gobbled up.

Verizon also released a statement yesterday saying that it would have to cap data speeds for its heaviest users in order to fairly distribute data speeds, “If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demands,” according to Mobileburn.

Learn more about the iPhone 4.