The download day for the world record attempt in the number of downloads by the Firefox community seems to be(come) a flop. It’s now 45min after the whole thing started and apparently the servers can’t handle the number of requests.
Or is something going on in parallel? Such as a DDoS of their webservers?
Update: Their site is back, although slow.
Update #2: So they’re prepared? Fun fact, I get offered the version 2 in the language which is set as primary in my primary browser (which isn’t Firefox). Wondering whether the world record attempt will even be valid in such a case …
Update #3: Okay, screw their world-record attempt. I have some sympathies for them, although it is not my favorite browser, but it’s simply getting ridiculous. I am getting offered version 2 as version 3 (screenshot below) and their download page for other languages and operating systems lists only version 2.0.0.14 (other screenshot) for any language. It’s definitely the worst-prepared world-record attempt. Maybe it will make it into the Guiness Book after all, although under a different category than anticipated?!
Update #4: It looks like they sorted it out now.
// Oliver
At least you got to the website I have tried a few times since this began and no luck.
Btw did you click the button to see which version was behind it? Wouldnt be the first time somebody forgot to change a text somewhere 😆
Yep, tried that. It was the German version 2.0.0.14 🙄
By the way, apparently it works now, but it also means that all downloads until around 18:50 should be considered invalid for the world record … right?
Okay, it works every now and then. They certainly have problems to tackle the load. So I’ll give up and they have less load from my IP for now
A flop indeed… we’re in 2008 and still, when a major release of something small like a web browser is announced, you get websites that get overloaded.
Besides, people don’t know anything about timezones or the exact release time… was a countdown clock on the website that hard to code?
Mozilla did a major blunder on the marketing part here.
They had focused on the US “market” and the US also had the biggest share of pledges, when I checked before 17:00 UTC. 17:00 UTC was the start time which had been announced and they had given several examples for other time zones in case someone doesn’t know his offset to UTC 😉