What’s most remarkable is I didn’t hear a single complaint from anyone saying they were experiencing slow downloads or server problems.
At 2-3 GB per download, that’s an impressive performance. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Microsoft and its partner Akamai Technologies served up something like 3 petabytes of Windows 8 downloads in 24 hours.
That’s a lot of data.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Heh. That’s what you get when you pay Akamai enough money.
I was downloading it with > 1.5 MB (megabytes) pr. second; impressive!
Actually I tried to run the exe updater file (to update a Developer Preview machine) on the first night of availability and got a “could not get product key” message. I googled it and there were others with the same problem. The speculation was the MS’s servers were overwhelmed with key requests.
I tried the next morning and the the update ran like a charm.