If you experience today hiccups while connecting to Internet websites, it might actually be a good sign! You wonder why getting disconnected is good? Well, today is IPv6 day! Internet service providers around the world but also website owners like ARIS Community are testing the so called Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). On a normal day, all websites run IPv4. This older version of the IP protocol has a major flaw: We are running out of addresses. If you type www.ariscommunity.com in your browser, it is mapped to an address like 87.230.41.19. The pool of such addresses is now almost exhausted, because there are only 4 billion available, not enough for all those fancy websites out there and gadgets we are used to carry around with us. Besides many additional enhancements, the IPv6 protocol extends the pool of available addresses to 340 undecillion (which is 3.4x10^38 or in simpler terms "a very large number").
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 won't be easy, because it is impossible that everyone connected to the Internet makes the transition on the same day. Therefore, websites must be accessible by IPv4 and IPv6. That's what we are testing today. It's not just us, but the Internet Society initiated the World IPv6 Day today, a global test of IPv6.
ARIS Community is now running in dual stack mode meaning the site is delivered through IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. If the site is looking as it used to be (and most probably it does as you are able to read this article), everything is fine. If you are already using IPv6 to access the Internet (most probably you aren't), tell us what happens if you open http://[2a01:488:42:1000:57e6:2913:9c:9fd6]/ in your browser (send us screenshots). If you experience any problems like missing images or not being able to login, make sure to send us an email along with an error description so that we can investigate if that's related to the IPv6 test. Thank you for your support testing the future of the Internet!