MONTREAL — About 9,000 Canadian-owned computers could be infected and lose access to websites, email and social networking today when the FBI shuts down temporary servers used to stop a scam, experts say.

Overall some 300,000 computers, most of them in the United States, Italy and India, could be infected and lose their Internet service, Queen’s University associate professor Thomas Dean said Friday.

“The computer will start up, but when you try to use your mail or try to use your browser, you are going to get some kind of error message,” Dean said from Kingston, Ont.

Warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google and Dean said that initially about four million computers were infected globally.