Siri has stopped working for thousands in the UK. The iPhone 5 was released to the public today and it's possible that the massively increased number of new iPhone users may have overloaded Apple's servers enough for the voice service to have gone down.

As Pocket-lint was trying to access Siri on an iPhone 4S, it came up shortly t after 5.30pm, but then went down again. Now Siri won't reply with any standard results. Instead, the software responds with, "I'm really sorry about this, but I can't take any requests at the moment. Please try again in a bit."

The failure of service will come as a massive blow to those who have just got their hands on the new iPhone 5, only to not be able to use one of its major selling points.

Angry iPhone users have taken to Twitter to post their rants. Some are even asking others on the social network whether their phones are faring any better. Pocket-lint can confirm that they're not.

Apple has already had one blow on the launch of its new operating system iOS 6, which is also found on the iPhone 5. Apple Maps, which the company has used to replace Google Maps as the integrated mapping service, has been found to contain numerous bugs, misplaced locations and many other glaring errors.

Pocket-lint has dubbed that scandal as "Apple Maps-gate", have we now got a "Siri-gate" on our hands too? It's certainly a shame that this may have marred iPhone 5 launch day as it seems that sales records could well be broken.

And Siri had only just started to work properly in the UK when iOS 6 was launched on 19 September. Typical.

Have you had problems using Siri? Let us know in the comments below...