It's impossible, of course, to get a read on just how widespread iOS 5 installations problems were on Wednesday. Certainly, some editors were able to upgrade their iOS devices on Wednesday without much difficulty, particularly in the afternoon after the initial crush of iOS 5 updates subsided. Still, the volume of complaints about iOS 5 update issues seemed higher than what one might normally expect from a major software upgrade.

contributor Joel Mathis's case seems typical of the problems other users were reporting on Wednesday: He downloaded the iOS 5 updates, aimed to install them on his iPhone and iPad, and at the restoring stage, iTunes repeatedly failed. "The iPad 'Joel's iPad' could not be restored. An internal error occurred," iTunes told him again and again. Mathis event as far as completely resetting his iPad's settings to see if that would help. It didn't.

It's not an isolated case: My mother saw the same error, as did I, with my iPod touch. When I mentioned the problem on Twitter, senior contributor Rob Griffiths pointed out suffering from similar issues. 

We've put in a call to Apple to see if the company was aware of issues people may be having with the iOS 5 upgrade; the company hasn't responded to that request yet.

Apple certainly had a lot on its plate Wednesday. In addition to releasing iOS 5, the company also released iCloud as well as three new iOS apps. It also updated several existing iOS and Mac apps, released Mac OS x 10.7.2 and Safari 5.1.1, and even updated the firmware for its Apple TV set-top box. That's a lot of software to be pushing live at once, even for a company Apple's size.