World IPv6 Day Labeled a Success, Though Short-Term Benefits are Minimal

The World IPv6 Day came and went without too much excitement, which is actually a good thing. It seems that the experiment went smoothly for most companies involved. IPv6 traffic surged, as expected, but still made up a very small portion of all internet traffic on June 8th, during the hours the event took place.

Facebook, one of the big websites involved in the test, along with Google, Yahoo and quite a few others, is reporting that everything went very smooth and it didn't seen an increase in complaints from its users, signaling that there were no widespread problems.

"World IPv6 Day came to an end earlier today. We successfully enabled IPv6 on our site for 24 hours, with great results. We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6," Facebook's Donn Lee announced.

"We’re pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Center. The estimated 0.03% of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test," he added.

Indeed, 1 million users compared to virtually none the day before is a big deal. But considering that Facebook sees hundreds of millions of visitors each day, it's fairly insignificant.

While some report IPv6 doubling it was still at such a low level that it barely even registers. What's more, as soon as the World IPv6 Day came to a close, all of the big players were eager to shut down the dual stack connectivity.

Facebook at least decided to leave it on for its Developer site, which is a step forward, but a very small one. "Based on the encouraging results, we’ve decided to leave our Developer site dual-stacked, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. And we will continue to adapt our entire code base and tools to support IPv6," Lee added.