Amp’d Mobile on Friday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming that its back-end infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the company’s fast growth, leaving it unable to pay its bills.

In a statement released over the weekend, Amp’d officials said they were not shuttering the company’s doors like other MVNOs have in the past. Instead they are restructuring company, looking for ways to ease the $100 million in debt the company has racked up in the last year during its primary growth spurt. According to the Chapter 11 filing with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, Verizon Wireless is Amp’d Mobile’s largest creditor, owed $33 million. As an MVNO Amp’d leases voice and data airtime over VZW’s network, using its 3G EV-DO technology to power the MVNO’s data-centric services.

Amp’d owes one of its handset vendors, Motorola $16 million. Motorola just started shipping an Amp’d-branded Q to the carrier. Among its other creditors are retail partner Best Buy and one of the carrier’s investors, Vivendi Universal. Ironically all of Amp’d Mobile’s debts seem to be incurred from the wireless network side, which the company has been trying to distance itself from in recent months. In an interview earlier this year, chief operating officer Bill Stone said Amp’d launch the MVNO as a means to distribute its unique content, but the company’s ultimate goal was to become a mobile entertainment provider, licensing and selling content to other carriers. Amp’d has already taken the first steps toward that goal—it’s launches in Canada and Japan were not MVNOs but content deals with Tier I providers. And it recently licensed the rights to one of its mobisodes series, ‘Lil Bush’, to Comedy Central, which is turning it into an animated TV series.

The MVNO market has been a tough one of late. Mobile ESPN shut down earlier this year after less than a year in operation, but it relaunched as a content portal on Verizon Wireless’s V Cast deck. Amp’d Mobile may opt to do the same thing in bankruptcy, shifting the network management and back-end operations to partner Verizon Wireless, allowing it to become the pure-play content and entertainment company it envisions.

Amp’d said that during Chapter 11 reorganization it will continue normal operations while it negotiates debtor-in-possession financing from its investors. But Amp’d Mobile’s statement ominously added that the company’s senior management team remains “largely intact.” The statement did not go into any details about what management changes have occurred. Several rumors, however, have been circulating the industry blogs that Amp’d founder and CEO Peter Adderton is leaving the company either by his own choice or by choice of the board.