New York, July. 31st - The .cm domain name registry have today announced their postponement of the public first come first served launch for the .cm domain name, originally due at 00:00 UTC tomorrow.

Unrelated to the widely reported cable fault affecting Internet access in West Africa at present, the .cm registry have cited technical difficulties with their root name servers. The .cm registry have currently postponed the launch until further notice, although it’s anticipated to be re-scheduled to 00:00 UTC on Tuesday 4th August 2009.

"We are extremely pleased that the registry are dealing with the matter so thoroughly and have taken the sensible decision to postpone", said Matt Mansell, CEO, Domainmonster.com. "The Landrush period is now closed and this is the final public open registration stage where domain buyers can secure their .cm domains on a first come first served basis. We’ve seen unusually high Pre-Order levels for Open Registration, so the postponement will give purchasers a little extra time", continued Mansell.

Popular due to the Direct Navigation¹ said to account for 1 in 6 visitors to a web site, .cm is an incredibly close spelling to .com, the world’s largest top level domain. Brand owners and consumers alike are keen to protect traffic that directly navigates to their site; traffic reputed to convert at twice that delivered via a search engine.

Pre-Orders placed with Domainmonster.com will be held over to the revised launch date and users do not need to contact Domainmonster.com to ensure their submission is safe.

¹Direct Navigation is also known as "Type-In" traffic. This is where a user directly enters the address required in their browser address bar, rather than navigating to a search engine first.