If you have been keeping tabs on Nokia at all lately you may know several things about what has happened today. For one, Nokia officially flipped the switch on its Ovi Store globally. And two: the launch has been a complete and unquestionable disaster for them.

The Ovi Store of course is Nokia’s answer to Apple’s App Store, and promises to be a good move for the company—once they get it up and running properly. So, what has happened? Well apparently the site recieved a lot of traffic due to the press coverage and excitement of its users, which overtaxed its servers. This resulted in loading freezes or very slow loading time, total disappearance of some pages, and overall total lack of function. To Nokia’s credit they moved fast, responding with this update:

Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further.

The Ovi Store device client, however, has continued to perform very well and there were no reported issues from users logged on through that entry point.

If the fail had stopped there it would have been okay, but that was not to be. Users have reported log-in attempt error messages aplenty, plus some products have actually disappeared from the website altogether while others are listed twice. The categories are also quite confusing, with simple searches such as “games” displaying zero results or freezing while loading.

Beyond the bugs, users seem to have a few nitpicks with the design of the store itself:

• There is no distinction between Java apps and native Symbian apps
• Hang time between screens can be as much as five seconds on handset access, which means a slower user experience than with Apple’s App Store
• There is no easy and obvious way for users to browse through sub-categories
• Touchscreen interaction with the software is a little buggy
• Buying content requires up to three screens, which seems like way too many

It’s not all bad though, as the content in the Store will no doubt grow tremendously over the next few months, and Nokia does take the time to determine apps based on your geographical location and the device you are using. Another benefit is that Nokia has a very active, very vocal set of users. Since the company does a good job of moving quickly on fixing issues these two pluses should combine to make the teething problems found in the store disappear fast.