Amazingly enough, Twitter was available for long enough today to allow the mozillafirefox Twitter account to relay the fact that Mozilla is having some server troubles due to anticipation of the release of Firefox 3, which was set to become available at 10am Pacific time this morning:

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly.  Download day will officially commence once the site goes live.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment.  Thanks for your continued support.

The “Download Day” mentioned refers to the Firefox team’s attempt at setting a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24-hour period.  More information on the effort is available over at The Register.

I noticed that the server at GetFirefox.com was already having some issues a couple hours before the official, planned kick-off, so it sounds like things have only gotten worse since then.  Even if the Firefox team does manage to get their servers back online, one has to wonder whether the bandwidth will be such that the 24-hour period will accurately reflect the number of downloads that were intended by the browser’s broad user base.

I’ll likely be posting more on this later in the day, so stay tuned.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,