by Jason Snell
Apple.com: Only mostly dead?

Time was, Apple would take store.apple.com
down for hours when it was about to add products or do a pre-order. These days, Apple’s site doesn’t have a store anymore—the whole site is a store. So a few hours before iPhone 6S preorders… the entire site went down.
But Stephen Hackett points out all the zany trolling comments in the WHOIS data – which are unrelated, presumably.
Regardless, I assume they’ve put a fresh pot of coffee on in Cupertino.
[Update: It’s back up at the moment.]
@512px Interesting theory on hacker news https://t.co/aFyN2h1ZJD pic.twitter.com/5baeF41guA
— Paul McGrane (@pmcg) September 12, 2015