Firefox Download Challenge Goes Boom

(MoneyWatch)  The world record download attempt for Firefox 3 is off to a rough start.

Shortly after 1 p.m. EDT, 10 a.m. PDT (Mozilla's official launch time) I went to spreadfirefox.com and got the following:


I'm sure Mozilla will fix this little glitch, but it's the equivalent of tripping out of the starting gate. What happened? Everyone reported on the Firefox launch (Techmeme), anticipation built and boom the site blew up.

Also see:

• Review: Firefox 3.0
• Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Firefox 3.0 final: What's new
• Ed Burnette: Don't download Firefox 3 yet

Update: Mozilla said in a blog post:

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.

Update 2: Site appears to be back up for downloading. However, when I set my region I get a download for Firefox 2.0.0.14.

Update 3: Spreadfirefox.com is down again as of 2:51 p.m. EDT.

Update 4: Site appears to be functioning as normal as of 3:24 p.m. Mozilla says on its developer blog:

Thanks to overwhelming demand we've passed through 14,000 downloads a minute! This will put us well into the tens of millions of downloads in a 24 hour period if we can sustain it. Each download is about 7MB so that's around 13 Gigabits/s of just download traffic. Not too shabby!

Get yours here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Credit: ZDNet