The Mozilla Foundation’s servers yesterday buckled under the strain of its own PR stunt to convince World+Dog to download Firefox 3 and set a new record over a 24-hour period.

So far, at the time of writing, the open source organisation is claiming just over 7m downloads of its latest browser - despite the fact that at launch the Mozilla’s servers went titsup, apparently under the weight of demand.

Firefox 3 Download Day was supposed to break cover at 10am PDT 17 June, but sadly Mozilla’s marketing team hadn’t foreseen what it described as the “outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around” the web browser which it reckoned had been “overwhelming (literally!)”. Quite.

No matter though, said Mozilla, which decided instead to simply bypass the small detail of its servers spitting out html errors and being largely unavailable at launch by starting the official download day once the site finally went live nearly two hours later than planned.

Mozilla will make the record books for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, seeing as there’s no Guinness World Record to beat.

But the PR cock-up prompted one Firefox observer, going by the name Grouchal, to pose the question on Mozilla's forum: "Hasn't the whole thing [record attempt] been ruined by annoying your users?

"You will only get this record now - because no one else has the record - not the record you could have had though with a bit of organisation," said Grouchal. ®

75 comments posted — Comment period finished