SOUTH African companies will from next week shut down their Internet and e-mail connections to avoid a rash of computer viruses expected to strike on January 1. The Sunday Times listed more than 10 prominent companies, including the top commercial banks, as among those who will cut their electronic links until a few days after New Year’s Eve to avoid the feared viruses. Clothing group Edgars will sever Internet and e-mail communications from Tuesday, but most others will shut down on December 31, it said. Computer security expert Ian Melamed said the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had received 30000 millennium virus warnings. “Even if 29000 are hoaxes, the 1000 real ones will overwhelm our capacity to fight them,” he said. South Africa’s Y2K national support centre has said the so-called millennium bug, in which computers cannot differentiate between the years 2000 and 1900, should not cause many glitches in the country as important systems had been upgraded to cope with the problem.