World IPv6 Day Is Underway, Google Is Ready

The World IPv6 Day is upon us, for 24 hours, companies around the world will be offering native IPv6 connectivity for their sites and services to test the readiness of the internet to make the switch to the newer protocol.

If successful, you shouldn't notice anything special about today, but if you're having problems connecting to your favorite sites, you may be one of the few people affected by poor network configurations and hardware.

At the beginning of the year, the Internet Society along with several big companies, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, announced that June 8 will be labeled World IPv6 Day and that all companies involved with the initiative will enable native connectivity.

The reason why this is a big event is that the move will affect some users negatively, not all configurations are ready to direct visitors to sites that offer both IPv4 and IPv6 connections over the same domain.

However, that number is small, 0.03 percent to 0.05 percent of all users, and the event plays a much bigger role in raising awareness of the need to make the switch to the smaller companies and ISPs which have been putting off the move.

"At midnight UTC on June 8 (Tuesday afternoon in the U.S., Wednesday morning in Asia), all the participants will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. For Google, this will mean virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available over IPv6," Google wrote ahead of the event.

"Operating system vendors and browser manufacturers have been releasing updates to resolve IPv6 connectivity issues—for example, Google Chrome now incorporates workarounds for malfunctioning IPv6 networks—and we’ve seen router manufacturers test their devices for robust IPv6 support as well," it added.

That's not all, Google has been running in "World IPv6 Day mode" internally for several months now, meaning that everything is connected via the IPv6 protocol, helping it find problems at every level, from the regular users, to the local routers all the way up to the data centers.