Watch the Y2K bug live across the world

US based Internet performance monitoring firm, Keynote Sytems, will post up-to-the-minute details of Internet devastation or lack of it, on its Web site at http://www.keynote.com.

Information will be based on detailed monitoring of the performance of major Web sites in all of the world's 24 major time zones. More than 2,000 measurements will be taken during the global millennium change from over 90 sites world-wide. Keynote believes that any problems with the Internet's underlying network will be evident in the performance of these sites and plans to post details of this impact on its own site immediately.

Unfortunately this slightly ironically means that, should the Internet be seriously disrupted, this information may be inaccessible anyway.

Keynote has, however, also created an international hotline for researchers to monitor and counteract the effects of the Y2K bug on the Internet's infrastructure. A Keynote spokeswoman outlines the significant effect that the bug could have on the Internet saying, "The infrastructure of the Internet is one of the world's largest distributed computing systems. It comprises millions of routers, switches, DNS servers and other specialised computers that manage and carry Internet traffic between World Wide Web sites and user PCs. A Y2K problem in any of these components could produce a cascading effect on Internet performance and availability."

Keynote monitors the availability and download-standards of many of the world's largest Web site's and publishes the Keynote Business 40, a round-up of the Internet's best performing sites.