Mozilla, the scrappy open-source software company, hoped to set a one-day software download record on Tuesday with the launch of Firefox 3, the latest copy of its popular web browser. The company even went so far as to set up a special web page to promote its Guinness Book of World Records bid.
But Mozilla’s hoped-for PR coup turned into something of a debacle as thousands of eager downloaders rushed the site. The result was an internet equivalent of the Cleveland Indians’ infamous “10 cent beer night ” in 1974, in which an inebriated mob of baseball fans - lured by the promise of all-you-can-drink 10 cent beers - laid waste to portions of Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
In Mozilla’s case, the flood of download requests for Firefox 3 rendered the Mozilla.com site inaccessible to other users for part of the day. The cock-up drew jeers from web commentators. As VentureBeat wrote:
It is both annoying and laughable when a company massively hypes its own launch, only to result in broken links and 404 pages.
Mozilla had to know its servers would get slammed around 10 AM PST (the start time), hell, it begged for it to happen. In the blogosphere, we have a word for this: FAIL.
Hey, at least no one got hurt. The latest word from Mozilla is that the company is on track to break the download record in spite of the earlier problems.
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