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Microsoft’s long awaited Windows 7 Public Beta Update was released yesterday – for a few hours. The public beta was supposed to be available to the first 2.5 million people to sign up. Naturally, when it hit the market, about five million people tried to download at once.

“Server is too busy” was what many of these people saw, along with the 404 error page. The signup page, when reached, would crash after each submission attempt saying that the server was too busy to process the request, subsequently redirecting to an error page once again. The queue consistently showed wait times of more than an hour and a half, and would be downloaders were getting frustrated.

Microsoft’s Web server Internet Information Services (IIS), supposedly one of the very best servers in existence, just isn’t strong enough to handle the website traffic volume from such stampede.

Steve Balmer at CES said “We’re putting in all the right ingredients [to Windows 7]: simplicity, reliability and speed. And we’re working hard to get it right and to get it ready.” Unfortunately, the ISS server isn’t living up to his words.

Microsoft pulled the public beta. The few people that managed to start a download saw that download killed. Microsoft has replaced the text on Technet to “Windows® 7 Beta coming soon!”

Consumers will have to wait a while longer for Windows 7! This is a huge disappointment for many who were eagerly awaiting the download and there are plenty of disgruntled customers today whose faith in Microsoft is damaged.

Microsoft has not stated when the download will be available again. There are obviously some issues they will have to deal with to avoid another systems crash. If they can manage to run it off a dedicated server, perhaps the next attempt will be more successful!