If you're anxious to get your hands on the official Windows 7 beta from Microsoft today, you're going to have to be patient. Since early this morning the company's web servers have been struggling to manage the massive influx of web traffic.

For the past hour and a half both the main Microsoft site and the Windows Team Blog have been extremely slow or totally unreachable.

The situation makes me wonder:

1. When will there be a shift to P2P distribution for major software releases like this? It seems to work fairly well for the hundreds of Linux distributions available, even the big names like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.
   
   
2. Has Microsoft already started using P2P? Leaks of Windows 7 have been all over the place since build 6801, and there's certainly no reason that an OS that is set to shut itself down on August 1st couldn't have been uploaded to torrent trackers intentionally.

Windows 7's availability on the trackers is certainly going to help Microsoft reach beta testers, especially as long as their own servers continue to fight an uphill battle with beta-hungry downloaders.