Mozilla collapses under weight of downloads

Firefox 3's heavily promoted launch campaign appears to have worked, with the company reporting that in the first few hours of release 14,000 people were downloading the software every minute.

With each copy of Firefox 3 clocking in at 7MB, that means the company's servers were dealing with a staggering 13 gigabits of data every second. It's unsurprising then, that the success came at a cost, with Mozilla.com being knocked offline for almost two hours as servers struggled to cope with initial demand.

"The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!)", the company noted on its blog. "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."

With the servers now up and running, Mozilla currently estimates that it is "serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts Mozilla on track to achieve five to seven million downloads the first day of general availability."

Firefox 3 is available from mozilla.com/firefox.