AT&T was first on the scene to report record breaking sales of the iPhone 5 this weekend. Now Apple has joined in on the fun and has given us an actual number.

According to a press release the fruit company has gone on to sell over 2 million iPhone pre-orders within the first 24 hours! To put this number into perspective, that is more than double the previous record of 1 million held by the iPhone 4S.

With this huge demand for the iPhone 5 Apple has mentioned that it has exceeded its initial supply. This means that though most people who pre-ordered the iPhone 5 will get their handset on time, unfortunately some are scheduled to be delivered in October.

Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide marketing commented that the demand for the iPhone 5 has been phenomenal to say the least, and he could not be more right. The iPhone 5 was quoted a 2-3 week shipping time within the first hour of pre-orders and the iPhone 4S took nearly a day to reach this shipping timeframe.

“iPhone 5 pre-orders have shattered the previous record held by iPhone 4S and the customer response to iPhone 5 has been phenomenal,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone 5 is the best iPhone yet, the most beautiful product we’ve ever made, and we hope customers love it as much as we do.”

To further visualize how much of a demand there is for the iPhone 5 the folks over at Gigaom have put together a chart showing the sales of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S compared to Apple’s new iPhone.

In case you are wondering, the reason why the iPhone 3G and 3GS was not included is because Apple did not provide first-day figures for those models.

It is expected that we will get some analyst predictions on iPhone 5 sales for this quarter later today, so stay tuned. Until that time let us know what you think of this record breaking number of pre-orders in the comments.