It looked for a moment like Apple's massive new data center in North Carolina would withstand the deluge of traffic caused by people updating to iOS 5, iCloud, and everything in between without incident, but it's apparently not meant to be: we're now getting errors trying to update various iPhones and iPads to iOS 5, and we're seeing similar reports across Twitter. Although the error message that pops up just says "internal error," the real issue seems to be that Apple's iOS validation servers aren't responding, leaving the update process to fail out.

Making matters just slightly worse, we're also noticing that direct downloads of the iOS 5 IPSW files seem to be taking much longer than usual — an hour or even two in some cases. It seems like those of us who decided to update later in the day will just have to wait it out — let us know how it's going for you in the comments.