Demand for mobile game Angry Birds almost sunk GetJar, the app store where the Google Android version of the game first appeared today. GetJar said that the demand for the game, which has sold more than 7 million units on the iPhone in the past 10 months, was so big that it brought down the company’s servers.
Chris Dury, a GetJar executive, wrote on the company’s blog, “Wow! People love Angry Birds! Today we launched the full version of Angry Birds for Andriod, before it was available anywhere else. The demand exceeded all expectations and degraded performance on getjar.com. For some time, the site was inaccessible due to the load.”
Users are downloading the game to phones that run the Google Android operating system.
Dury said the company has built its team to 60 people in the past few months and improved its capacity. But the store wasn’t able to handle eight times to 10 times more users downloading apps at the same time. GetJar normally does 3 million downloads a day, and today the company might have hit more than 10 million if all had gone well. In a couple of weeks, GetJar will add more scale and be able to handle more than 10 million downloads per day. Dury offered his “deep regrets” to Angry Birds developer Rovio and game fans.
Over the weekend, the game will also be available on the Android Market as a free, ad-supported download.