It seems an ex-Google employee noticed that google.com was available to register last week, and managed to register and have control of it for a full one minute!MBA student and ex-Google employee Sanmay Ved registered the domain and paid $12 for his moment of fame he claimed in a post on his LinkedIn profile.Ved wrote:
“A strange thing happened at 1:20 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 29. I was learning more about the Google Domains interface, and typed google.com and clicked search domains. To my surprise, Google.com was showing as available!”He managed to complete the purchase and posted screenshots of the registration process.”As soon as I completed purchase, I received two emails, one from sc-noreply@google.com, and one from wmt-noreply@google.com, which is not the norm when you book domains via Google Domains as I have booked new, previously un-registered domains before, and I have never received emails from the above aliases on booking the domains. I will not share the contents of the emails here given they relate to the Google.com domain. The domain also successfully appeared in my Google Domains order history.”Ved went on to write that while his purchase was successful “the purchase was followed by an order cancellation email from Google Domains. Google could do this given the registration service used by me (aka Google Domains) belonged to Google, unlike the 2003 event in which Microsoft forgot to renew their Hotmail UK domain which was registered with Nominet UK.”