Some may find their smartphones working overtime because the family computer couldn't connect to the internet yesterday morning.If that sounds familiar, you may be one of a few dozen computer users on the Island who waited too long or simply didn't believe the warnings about the DNS Changer malware that took over computers around the world and your internet shut down just after midnight Monday.The FBI turned off the internet servers that were functioning as a temporary safety net to keep infected computers online for the past eight months. At one point, the servers supported millions of users infected with the malware, but when the servers shut down, thousands were disconnected from the internet — far fewer than expected.Bermuda was left with 31 users affected and losing internet access, according to local security firm, QuoVadis Group. The US had the most affected users with more than 47,000 losing access. That was followed by Italy in second place with 21,508 users, and India in the third spot, with 19,991 infected users. The Royal Gazette first warned readers of the malware problem in April and explained how to tell if a computer was infected. If your computer was affected yesterday, your only hope now is to call your internet service provider's help desk.The problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of more than 570,000 infected computers around the world. When the FBI went in to take down the hackers late last year, agents realised that if they turned off the malicious servers being used to control the computers, all the victims would lose their internet service.In a highly unusual move, the FBI set up the safety net. They brought in a private company to install two clean internet servers to take over for the malicious servers so that people would not suddenly lose their internet.And they arranged for a private company to run a website, http://www.dcwg.org, to help computer users determine whether their computer was infected and find links to other computer security business sites where they could find fixes for the problem.From the onset, most victims didn't even know their computers had been infected, although the malicious software probably slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.Efforts to solve the issue have been hindered a bit by a few factors: Many computer users don't fully understand the technologically complex machines they use every day to send e-mail, shop, and surf for information. The cyber world of viruses, malware, bank fraud and internet scams is often distant and confusing, and warning messages may go unseen or unheeded.Others simply don't trust the government, and believe that federal authorities are only trying to spy on them, or take over the internet, by pushing solutions to the infection. Blogs and other internet forums are riddled with postings warning of the government using the malware as a ploy to breach computers — a charge that the FBI and other cybersecurity experts familiar with the malware quickly denounced as ridiculous.There is an underlying sense that this has been much ado about nothing — like the hoopla over Y2K, when the transition to the year 2000 presented technical problems and fears that some computers would stop working because they were not set up for the date change. In the end there were very few problems.Considering that there are millions of internet users across the United States, thousands of them losing access isn't a big deal — unless you are one of them.FBI officials have been tracking the number of computers they believe still may be infected by the malware. About 42,000 computers were affected Monday. The number of users who actually lost internet worldwide was roughly 211,000. The numbers have been steadily declining, and recent efforts by internet service providers may have limited the problems.The United States has charged seven people with orchestrating the worldwide internet fraud. Six were arrested in Estonia, while the seventh, who was living in Russia, is still at large. Estonia has extradited two of the men to New York, where they appeared in Manhattan federal court.