Early Tuesday morning, Google.com had a lucky new owner - Sanmay Ved, an ex-Googler from Boston. Sanmay was having a look around the Google Domains website and decided to see if Google.com was available, and to his surprise it was. So, for the very reasonable price of $12, Sanmay snatched up one of the most popular domain names in the world.
After finding out that the transaction was successful, and his credit card had been charged, Sanmay started receiving internal Google emails.
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 […]
Additionally, my Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) was auto-updated with webmaster related messages for the Google.com domain which actually means ownership was transferred to me!
In addition to now owning the Google.com domain, Sanmay also started receiving change notifications for Google Sites run websites.
Eventually, the fun came to an end when Sanmay received an order cancelation email from Google Domains. Given that he bought the domain through a Google-run property, the company was able to cancel his purchase and revert back ownership.
Sanmay said that he also reported the incident to Google Security, and that they have acknowledged the problem.
Google isn"t the only company to lose control of a domain. Several years back, Microsoft didn"t renew it"s hotmail.co.uk domain and it was snatched up by a member of the public.
Source and Images: Sanmay Ved via LinkedIn