June 19 was AT&T's "iLaunch Day 2009", best ever sales

When the iPhone 3GS was announced, analysts expected pretty good sales - nothing too extreme or mind blowing, but not poor either. Apparently they were wrong. The website Mac Daily News has been tipped off with an internal AT&T company memo, explaining that the 3GS launch was the best sales day the company had ever seen, and dubbed it "iLaunch Day 2009." We've included the memo below.

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year's Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text."

2. "iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here's a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

* Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
* Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
* Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
* Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
* Largest order day in att.com history
* Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year's launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008's iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008's launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

The memo doesn't exactly say how many sales were made, but after being contacted by Apple Insider, a spokesperson said, "We have no further comment beyond that," after repeating the fact that they had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders. Apple itself was a bit more revealing in terms of numbers, as it stated that there were over one million iPhones sold in three days. No doubt next year we'll see even higher figures, although only time will tell.