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All Firefox servers came to a grinding halt as it attempted to set a world record for the largest number of downloads in 24 hours.

Mozilla announced the availability of new Firefox 3 for public on 17 June which caused a flood of traffic and a massive slowdown of its servers.

The company kicked off the effort at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, thus starting the clock on the 24-hour race to a Guinness world record for the most number of downloads.

Just an hour into the launch, a massive load of user traffic was threatening to sink the efforts. The company said that, at its peak, traffic for the new browser hit 14,000 downloads per minute as users were demanding a whooping 2Gb per second in HTTP traffic alone, while download traffic hit 13Gb per second.

The massive rush caused download speeds to slow to a trickle by 12:30 PM US Pacific time. At some places people were getting a download speed of less than 7kb per second on T1 lines.

While Mozilla’s main site and the getfirefox.com domain were up, the spreadfirefox.com promotional site for the event remained down.

By 2:00 PM, the site was back online and traffic had slowed. According to Mozilla vice president of product marketing Paul Kim:

The company was currently serving around 8,000 downloads per minute and estimated that anywhere from five to seven million downloads would be served by the end of the first day. We’re thrilled with the response to the release of Firefox 3.

He said their systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through, but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads.

Researchers at Net Applications have forecasted that Firefox will crack 20 percent market share in July, following the release of version 3. Net Applications’ data shows that Firefox’s market share rose in May to 18.4 percent, while Internet Explorer’s dropped by a percentage point.