Mozilla Struggles With Firefox 3 Download Traffic

The Mozilla Foundation's main web site and download site have experienced availability problems in the early minutes of availability for the hotly-anticipated Firefox 3 web browser. Uptime charts from the web monitoring service Netcraft shows that the direct download site at download.mozilla.org is faring somewhat better than the main site at www.mozilla.org, although both sites have experienced availability challenges.

The official release of Firefox 3 was announced as 1 pm Eastern time today, which the company has deemed "Download Day," as part of a campaign asking users to download Firefox 3 on the first day it is released to estanlish a world record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. Accounts at Slashdot suggest the download sites began experiencing problems within minutes of the launch.