Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day

Kolargol00 writes "An outage affected the Mozilla.com website on the day the organisation launched its Guinness World Record attempt for downloads of the new Firefox 3 browser. The mozilla.com site was unreachable from around the world, occasionally responding with the message, 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.'" Since they decided to run their day from 1pm to 1pm Eastern time, the download day is actually still going, so you can still get Firefox and be part of the record.

Comments

And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[nweaver]

I'm quite sure Amazon would have been delighted to host mozilla.com temporarily on the EC2 cloud, or Akamai on their service, just for the bragging rights of supporting the most downloads EVAR!

Victoria's Secret learned a LONG time ago when broadcasting their "Fashion show" online for the first time: If you want to deal with massive hordes of salavating geeks, you need to use a CDN.

Potentially harmful?

[urcreepyneighbor]

Ugh. What the hell?

Attempted to download Firefox (Safari on Windows XP) and I get this message when the download is complete:

Windows found that this file is potentially harmful.

To help protect your computer, Windows has blocked access to this file.

Name: Firefox Setup 3.0.exe

Re:Download Counter

[bunratty]

And not only are users downloading it, they're installing and using it. Usage of Firefox 3 has gone from under 1% to over 4% in less than 24 hours. That's a quarter of all Firefox users already using the latest version, or many million new Firefox users.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[Blakey Rat]

Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat? They currently give out IE for free, so it's not like they're making money off of it, and the vast majority of Firefox installs go on Windows computers, so it's not like Firefox significantly is increasing Linux adoption...

Hell, the IE team sent them a cake:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
And I'd wager it makes their jobs a lot more interesting and important, so there's no resentment there.

I don't get why Microsoft would care, frankly.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[indifferent children]

Maybe Firefox is a boon to the employees on the IE team, by forcing MS to pay people to improve their browser. Firefox is a burden to Microsoft (the company), because it forces the company to pay people to improve their browser. You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.