“Top websites and Internet service providers around the world, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks, joined together with more than 1000 other participating websites in World IPv6 Day for a successful global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6,” reports Internet Society (ISOC) in its day after news release on World IPv6 Day held on Wednesday, Jun 8.

ISOC reports:

“During World IPv6 Day organized by the Internet Society, nearly 400 participating organizations enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours on 8 June. ... A key goal of World IPv6 Day was to expose potential issues with real-world IPv6 use under controlled conditions. Given the diversity of technology that powers the Internet, the global nature of the trial was crucial to identify unforeseen problems. The vast majority of users were able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, users experienced impaired access to participating websites during the trial.”

A number of organizations were busy collecting data closely monitoring yesterday’s event. Rob Malan of Arbor Network writes:

“After reflecting on the data from IPv6 day, the phrase the best comes to mind is: “Wagon’s Ho!” It’s going to be a long hard slog to IPv6-Land. Yesterday’s IPv6 flag day looks to have been a success. After a decade of implementation work by the infrastructure vendors in building towards IPv4 functional parity, combined with the months of preparation by the content and service providers in constructing the routing and namespace frameworks, IPv6 day came off successfully. For a 24 hour period starting at midnight UTC, anyone with IPv6 access connectivity could get to some of the largest content providers’ data through their v6 stacks. With six of our customers’ help, we were able to get a glimpse into some of the details of the day.”

Application breakdown for native IPv6 traffic from six carrier partners. Source: Arbor Networks (Click to Enlarge)

Donn Lee of Facebook reports:

“We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6. 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. 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.”