The developers of Firefox decided to make a bit of a splash when they release Firefox version 3 by announcing they were going to try to make it into the record books for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. To this end, they set up a website at http://www.spreadfirefox.com to announce “Firefox Day” as 17 June 2008.

The first thing that went wrong was that 17 June 2008 starts at different times in different timezones so for those whose 17th started when it was still 16th in San Francisco, they were left wondering where they could download the software until a helpful staffer stated that “Firefox Day” and the record attempt would start at 10.00am PDT (or 6.00pm UK BST).

Now I am not sure what exactly happened at 9.00am PDT – whether people at other browser software providers in the same timezone all started repeatedly hitting F5 on the various Firefox sites, maybe? - but since that time, all the Firefox sites have been reporting errors: too many MySQL connections at the Spread Firefox site and Http/1.1 Service Unavailable errors at the Get Firefox site.

What an unmitigated PR disaster for them!