A Bermuda-based e-commerce company has had thousands of Web surfers looking for popular sites like Yahoo! mistakenly directed to its site because of a technical glitch on Saturday.

This is according to a story posted on Internet e-magazine, Newsbytes in Vancouver.

The article said that others looking for popular destinations on some of the many Web sites operated by Microsoft were greeted with an "under construction'' page at no-charge Web-hosting outfit Mydomain.com, which is based in Bermuda.

And it said officials at Mydomain.com said that the cause wasn't a malicious hacker but a technical glitch at their end. This may have been exacerbated by Internet servers elsewhere who are not resolving domain names the way they should.

It said that at the heart of the issue was the Domain Name System (DNS) that allowed Internet-connected computers to be identified by user-friend monikers (like "www.yahoo.com'').

It went on to explain that DNS servers running on a hierarchy of hosts throughout the Internet responded to queries containing such domain names by digging up the Internet protocol IP) addresses of actual host computers.

Glitch misdirects surfers It added Mydomain.com President Richard Lau admitted that his company made a mistake on Saturday when it published an error-riddled table of DNS entries for domains his company supports for its thousands of clients.

Mr. Lau told Newsbytes that the data his company loaded on to its own DNS servers included a cache of bogus records created by Mydomain.com tools that allowed customers to manage DNS information for their own Web-server and e-mail services.

While it's possible that some Mydomain.com customers had been hoping to use those relatively simple DNS-management tools to hijack high-profile Web sites, Mr. Lau said it was more likely that rookie users were simply entering incorrect data by mistake.

According to the article, he added that either way Mydomain.com had systems in place to catch bogus entries. What was more, he said, as a technique for hijacking Internet traffic, it should not have worked. But the problem did reroute many Web surfers on the weekend for what Mr. Lau said was about eight hours.

He said the problem may have had been noticeable for as many as 100,000 Internet users, but that most of the Net would have been oblivious to the glitch.

"Like many disasters, it started with human error,'' Mr. Lau told the magazine and explained that the erroneous DNS entries Mydomain.com had been screening out were suddenly dumped into its own DNS tables.

Mr. Lau, who heads a Bermuda-based family of companies that includes domain-name registrar NamesDirect.com, said his staff didn't expect the glitch to be a problem for DNS look-ups outside their own network until traffic to Mydomain.com servers began to redline.

BUSINESS BUC