Sanmay Ved, a former Amazon and Google employee, was able to buy the domain google.com, for a whole minute, thanks to a glitch in the beta service Domains of Google.
As Sanmay recounts in one post on LinkedIn, all happened on Tuesday September 29 when he was looking at the service domain of Google, and was looking to find no good name to buy.
Out of habit, after working for five years at Google, he typed google.com into the field searchand, to his surprise, the google.com domain appeared to be available for sale.
Thinking it was a bug, he continued at all stages of the dmain name entry. The service put the name in its shopping cart, went through the checking procedures, charged its credit card, sent a SMS notification of its payment with a credit card, and finally sent it by email and all the details of the dome that he bought.
When Google realized what he had done, just a minute later, he returned $ 12 (€ 10,70) he paid for the purchase, clarifying to Sanmay that he was not the owner of the most expensive dòmain of the internet.
Something similar happened to Microsoft in 2003 when it forgot to update it hotmail.co.uk, but also in 1999 when it forgot to renew passport.com which is also used by one of Hotmail's services.
This time, since Google is a certified dsomain registrar, it was able to cancel the transaction, and get the dome back without having to buy it again from its temporary owner.
