[Richard M]

This article is the story of the FF launch day and is a very interesting read:

After a while the anticlimactic feeling faded as we began to get information about the number of downloads and the general reception of Firefox. As best we can figure it, around 1,000,000 people came to download Firefox on the first day alone. That's an astonishing number, far beyond what we had seen before. As Chris Hofmann put it, the building at the Mozilla Foundation might seem quiet, but the wires were burning up at Oregon State! And indeed the traffic did burn out some machines. By midday it was clear that our some of our mirrors were buckling under the load. For example, we had routed a good chunk of traffic to three jumbo sized load-balancers each fronting multiple machines in a big datacenter, and two of them burned out. (Note to alleviate speculation here: I am not talking about Google.)

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitch...10_laun_1.html