http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/13/openoffice_org_download_website_dead/Update OpenOffice.org organisers have blamed “unprecedented demand” for their site going offline as it delivered the long-awaited update of their open source office apps suite.
Organisers apologised on Monday for the massive outage saying their technical teams are “trying to come up with a resolution” while the main site's remnants pointed people to download sites across the world.
Eager beavers were clearly keen to get their hands on version 3.0 of OpenOffice.org - the free, open source-flavored suite of office apps - Monday morning.
The OpenOffice.org site buckled, though, under the strain at around midday GMT, and at time of writing it’s still out of action spitting out its new message.
El Reg had no trouble downloading the software at around 11am UK time today. Since then we’ve heard from plenty of openistas who have grumbled that they can’t access the site.
When attempting to get on to OpenOffice.org many users have been greeted with a message that reads: “The requested URL could not be retrieved. The following error was encountered: Connection Failed. The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.”
Presumably early risers in the States will have scurried to OpenOffice.org to download the outfit’s latest office apps and thereby contributed to halting the overloaded website.
Version 3.0, which has been available via several major mirror sites since Saturday evening, supports the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and can also open files (“docx”) created with Microsoft’s Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X. It also features a new Start Centre, icons and zoom control in the status bar.
Pretty nifty stuff, and it's free - well, that is when you can get on the site and successfully download it. ®
