Mozilla hyped today's Firefox 3 launch with a 'Download Day' appeal to Firefox users to all come get the new version at once and shoot for a new Guinness World Record.  But some network difficulties handling that huge rush of traffic is keeping many visitors from helping Mozilla reach that goal.

Mike Schroepfer of Mozilla wrote on the Mozilla developer center blog that you should head to http://getfirefox.com/ for the new browser (you can't yet get it by going to Help | Check for Updates within Firefox 2). That page appears to be coming up now, but for a good while the site was unresponsive.  After a few tries on the download link on that page I was just able to start a download.

Per Melissa Shapiro on a Mozilla blog posting from earlier today, "Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly."

I just talked to Kristen Whisenand, PR for Mozilla, who said their servers are churning out 14,000 downloads a minute.  At 7.8MB per download that's one giant flood of data, and most companies try to spread out the traffic instead of encouraging people to focus the spike (as I wrote previously).  Here's hoping Mozilla gets a better grip on the reins of this digital bucking bronco.

So if you're trying to download and can't get through, or maybe get an "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error, keep at it. Whisenand says some individual requests may not get through because the systems are so busy, but that the servers are up.