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At midnight, it became a birthday party. Dotcom was 39. The year was over.

THE HARD-WROUGHT 50,000 lines of code barely hung together. It was launched at 6.48am — the exact time a year earlier the helicopters touched down and the raid began. At launch, Dotcom announced one million visitors in the first 14 hours. There were more than 500,000 registered users.

Mega rocketed up the world's internet rankings. On launch day, it hit 141 on the Alexa rankings, meaning it was the 141st most popular website on the internet. As interest surged, the website buckled and then broke under the pressure.

For all the pizzazz of Mega's launch, the immediate reviews for the website reflected its early vulnerabilities. New software is usually extensively tested in controlled environments before being allowed out for public use. Some software is revealed as being so filled with bugs during Alpha and Beta testing that it needs extensive modification before release.

“It didn't happen with Mega,” says Dotcom. “Time was too tight and expectations too high. The launch was based on code that hasn't been tested. We didn't really have time to do an Alpha or Beta test or anything like that with users. We only had some simulated load tests but they don't really tell you much because they don't reflect the actual user behaviour.”

What they failed to appreciate was the degree of interest. The way in which the product was launched drew such attention from around the world that the site choked and then collapsed. “We launched this thing and with the massive attention it got, it really broke down. It couldn't handle the traffic.”

The crowd of people pouring into the website caused serious traffic jams. Accessing the site was difficult and uploading next to impossible. “The uploads got stuck for three days. The servers crashed because of a faulty driver,” says Ortmann. They were trying to work out if the hardware the site relied on was actually fit for purpose while dealing with an operating system which crashed every 10 minutes under an immense load.

“It was really very risky,” says Ortmann. “We were quite lucky in that it only took us three days to get the major issues sorted out. It was a positive surprise. We had estimated it would be up to two weeks.”

But the three days to deal to major bugs turned into another three

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