Today is World IPv6 day! (June 8, 2011)
As you might be knowing, IPv6 is the new IP addressing standard that is expected to replace IPv4 in a few years mainly because the number of available individual IPv4 (public) addresses that can be allocated to ISP’s and Organizations are getting exhausted very fast.
To encourage speedier adoption of IPv6 addresses, the Internet society has organized the World IPv6 Day (June 8, 2011) and many companies like Google, Yahoo, Akamai, Facebook, etc are participating in the same.
Primarily, these companies will offer some of their services in IPv6 for 24 hours, to check what kind of problems users might encounter. It is actually like a trial run. Based on the results, IPv6 readiness on a global scale can be estimated & more ISP’s and Websites might be encouraged to switch to IPv6 sooner than later. So, in case you experience some glitches while trying to connect to your favorite websites, its going to be just a temporary problem.
Of course, IPv4 addressing is expected to co-exist with IPv6 addressing for a few more years, and all these websites/ organizations would still support all the clients connecting to them using IPv4 addresses, along with IPv6 addresses.
Useful Links:
1. Technical information and advantages of IPv6 addressing
2. Internet Society IPv6 day FAQ
3. Ten things to know about the move to IPv6 – Computer World Article