Firefox 3...Servers Down

I could tell you to help set the Firefox 3 / Guiness download record, but I think everyone else on earth is blogging about that.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, there's still time to contribute to the record. Just go to SpreadFirefox.com and use the links there. Remember, if you downloaded Firefox 3 from a mirror, or got it before 1:00 PM EST, your download wasn't counted as part of the Guiness record.

Ok, with that out of the way, did any of you try to download the new version of Firefox at EXACTLY 1:00 PM EST (10:00 AM PST)? I tried myself, and also followed the thread on Slashdot to see what everyone else had to say about it.

Apparently, at 12:56 PM (All times are EST from now on.) The Mozilla servers all crashed. Nobody could access SpreadFirefox.com or mozilla.org. We were all being met with server timeouts and http 1.0 errors. If you check out the Slashdot thread, it's actually funny how everyone had to let us know the servers were down.

So the servers remained down until about 3:00 PM when I was finally able to get my hands on a fresh copy of Firefox 3. I didn't really "need" to be the first in line for it, but once I saw the servers were down, I became curious.

I think there were many things Firefox could have done to avoid this.

1. How about, don't schedule an exact time for your release!?!?! EVERY geek following this release just had to be the first one to download the new version. As the clock neared 1:00, the Mozilla servers got pounded because everyone needed to download it at that exact time. As one slashdotter put it, maybe we could also get the Guiness record for the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack performed by real people.

2. That first point was pretty much all I had, but I suppose they could have also planned for such an onslaught of traffic by better distributing the load.

There were also many complaints that "launch time" occurred at inconvenient times of the day around the world. "Launch Day" is June 17th, but it's being advertised as June 18th in Japan. Maybe they could have distributed launch time by making it 1:00 PM of whatever your local time is, like New Year's celebrations?

How do you think Mozilla could have avoided the server downtime?

Is it even a big deal that their servers went down for a couple hours?

Well, it's almost 11:00 PM here now and all of the download sites are working great. If you tried to get Firefox 3 earlier today but were denied, you should be good to go now. I encourage everyone to switch to Firefox. Why it's so much better than Internet Explorer will have to wait until another post.