I bought the "Apple Developer Program - Membership for one year" at 11:59AM today. I then went to the 'chat now' button on the order summary because I thought I did something wrong signing up for the account, since it was still pending (I've never used Apple dev before, and Google's was instant). The automated chat bot was painful to get through (tried for 5 min to connect to a specialist), but finally got through. While I was waiting to be connected, I received an 800 call at 12:31PM that I decided to pick up, and it was actually the Apple specialist calling to verify my purchase/account. We spoke for about 30 seconds, and as of 12:36PM my account is active. While I'm not a developer nor that technical, I needed to set up the account for a project -hope sharing this helps someone...