I mentioned last week that the official release of Firefox 3 would be today. I also mentioned the Cunning Plan to set a record for the most downloads of a program in a 24 hour period. What with time zones and all that, the official start of the period was set to be 18:00BST, or 10:00 on the left hand side of the US. People in between or beyond should be able to work out when that is for themselves. Anyway, it was well over an hour ago, so you can start any time you like.

Well, you can try. Even though I’m running release candidate 3, which should be pretty much identical with the final release, I was ready to grab the new version, and help with that record bid. So I went to Get Firefox, which is where you’re supposed to go to, err, get Firefox. Well, I tried. The first few times, the page didn’t load at all, and I got one of those messages which suggested that the connection had been lost, which could well be a sign of an overloaded server. The next few times, it redirected to a Mozilla page which told me that I really, really, really wanted Firefox 2. I don’t think so, I haven’t touched that in ages.

Then I got this one, which is a sign of a server that doesn’t want to serve up anything at all. I’m sure a lot of work and a lot of planning went into preparing for the rush, but it looks like someone may have underestimated something. Either that, or the internet is broken.