So how many downloads did Firefox 3 have in its first 24 hours?

According to John Lilly CEO of Mozilla it was a little more than 8.3 million downloads.

In total Lilly noted that Mozilla served up 83 terabytes of data. That after Mozilla's servers had a minor overload in the a.m. yesterday, but Mozilla quickly recovered.

• At the peak, we were serving 17,000 downloads a minute (283 per second!), and saw sustained download rates in excess of 4,000/minute
• Our peak mirror throughput during the period was 20 gigabits/sec
  

That's a whole lot of data for one day. It'll be interesting to see how/if this shows up as a world record (I don't see why it wouldn't) and whether or not any other vendor will challenge the record in the future.