"Microsoft and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) today urged all users of Microsoft's IIS 4.0 and 5.0 to install a security patch to protect against Code Red. The worm, currently in a dormant phase, will re-awaken August 1, 2001 at 0:00 GMT (4:00 PM PDT, July 31), and is thought to be more dangerous the second time around. Code Red spreads by scanning the Internet for vulnerable IIS systems, and it is this scanning activity which has the potential to degrade service across the entire Internet. A patch issued by Microsoft removes the IIS scanning vulnerability in Windows NT and 2000. Users of Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me are not affected by the Code Red worm."
Yeah, that worm is not really applicable to end users. However, it does apply to machines that serve up web pages, so certain sites you visit may be infected, and therefore appear to be really slow or possibly down. Just FYI, we run a combo of UNIX and Windows 2000 servers. We applied the IIS security fix for the code red worm when it first became an issue over a month ago. So the uptime of this site shouldn't be affected at all.