A survey conducted by San Francisco based company, Webmergers.com highlighted that at least 210 internet companies worldwide went out of business by the end of last year resulting in as many as 15,000 people losing their jobs as a result.

The rate of dot.com failure accelerated towards the end of 2000 as these companies appeared to run out of funding that began drying up after the stock market shake-up that occurred in March.

In this latter period, there were 121 closures (60%) and in the last three months, more than one company a day were finishing.

In December alone, 40 companies and about $1.5bn of investment money was lost, compared with 46 in November.

The sector hardest hit was the business-to-consumer which had 75% failures. 109 out of 210 were e-commerce businesses, 30 online content sites and the rest made up of infrastructure and other online service companies.

DeskTop.com and BizBuyer.com both closed in December before they ran out of money.