Can Firefox save face?

OK, I was all into helping make Firefox take home a world record for most software downloads in one day. You have to respect what they have done with their brilliantly executed SpreadFirefox campaign to date. I do not know why, but I just assumed, they had to know what to expect regarding server loads in doing this latest campaign. In fact, I was thinking that their big brother Google would make this in to a marketing campaign for their cloud initiative and would help in hosting the download burden. For that matter, shame on CNET who could have donated their front page for the initiative as well as their hosting services ... no reason why others could not make an excellent PR event out of Firefox's.

So here it is 2PM (est), and after FINALLY getting a response other then *timedout* from their server, it brings up a download page pointing to their older 2.0 release WTF????

So now, instead of having this potential PR event chime on throughout the next month, it is looking like more of a PR disaster. Now I am certain that the smart people over at Firefox will make this into a really positive PR spin "WOW! We had the bandwidth and were prepared for 10 Million downloads, but by 1:30 we already had 15 million requests!! ....

So other then the ultimate outcome of what they need to do to repair the PR spin what can we learn here?

PR is not the sole function of marketing, and in fact - The more of your team(s) that become involved directly, the better chance of success. For anything bandwidth intensive, DO have a scalable backbone, and provider - Lest your servers get "Twittered"