With Verizon Wireless announcing the highly-speculated and long-awaited CDMA iPhone at a New York City press event on Tuesday, strong interest in the newly-announced handset apparently resulted in sporadic outages on the Verizon website later in the day.

According to some reports of the downtime on Verizon, the biggest wireless provider in the US, the outages were largely a reminiscent of AT&T's iPhone 4 preorder troubles last year; and were a clear indication that the carrier's servers was overwhelmed by the pent up demand for the CDMA iPhone version.

Talking about the outages, one of the AppleInsider readers said that repeated attempts to access the upgrade section of Verizon's website either ending in the timing out of the connection or a message which read: "Safari can't open the page because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again."

Reports also say that the Tuesday outages are a beforehand signal that Verizon will likely experience an even greater increase in traffic when the CDMA iPhone 4 - to be officially launched on February 10 - becomes available for preorder "on or around February 3."

The Verizon iPhone's availability for preorder will allow Verizon customers to sign up on the Verizon website to get the handsets before "they're available to everyone else."