Diggers Swamp Mozilla Servers for Firefox 3.0 Beta

By Greg McNevin

November 12, 2007: Mozilla Corp. blocked access to its servers late last week when a rumour that the Firefox 3.0 beta was out appeared on Digg.com, leading to Mozilla’s developer servers being swamped by a multitude of users looking for the update.

The original story, posted by dig user “corvette”, claimed that the Firefox 3.0 beta was out and linked to under-construction build of the release, and not the official beta (which is still being worked on and is yet to be released). The story immediately gained attention, highlighting the increasing popularity of the open source browser, and sent a flood of users to the developer area of Mozilla’s site.

“At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta,” wrote Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's user interface designer, on the company's DevNews blog. “It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems.”

Beltzner cited the lack of quality assurance testing, the fact that the team has yet to complete the steps required for a build release and a lack of public mirrors as the problems that lead to the organization temporarily blocking access to its servers. He also said that the block was put in place to protect the organisation’s bandwidth and limit the distribution of an unfinished product. All the files could still be accessed via FTP.

The “digg effect” is well known for being a server killer due to it suddenly directing waves of traffic to sites as stories become exponentially popular. While this can be troublesome when an organisation is unprepared, it highlights both the growing power of social networking and the popularity of open source solutions.

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