Well, Firefox Download Day was nothing if not eventful. First and foremost, Mozilla appears to have succeeded in breaking the Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period as well as surpassing its lofty 5 million-download target for the the day. Not everything was rainbows and butterflies for Mozilla however. The first two hours were rough, very rough in fact. Apparently Mozilla underestimated the initial punch and just didn’t have the goods to support the first wave of anxious downloaders. BGR reader comments on our Download Day post covered the outage quite eloquently:
I have 3.0 RC3 and I like it, I was just going to attempt to get 3.0 release just for the world record, but it seems somebody really F-ed up. -MadMike
I’m not sure what record they are trying to set, but at the very least they’ll set the “most http request failed page refreshes”, the “most unsuccessful downloads”, and the “most feet ever swallowed” records hands down. -Paul
FF DOWNLOAD DAY = EPIC FAIL -poser
Despite all that, Mozilla servers shook off the criticism and came back just before 3:00 pm; about two hours after Download Day officially started. Would Mozilla be able to bounce back after the outage? Over 8 million downloads say yes. When all was said and done, it looks like Firefox Download Day will indeed result in a new world record. What’s more, the Mozilla network served over 83 terabytes of data during the 24-hour period and peaked at about 17,000 downloads per minute. Wow.
