Yesterday, Googlers in Germany went to Google.de, expecting to see this,

and instead, got a flash of this guy.

Hackers? nope. Google forgot to renew their domain name, and it was temporarily hosted by German domain company Goneo. Said a Google spokesperson, “For a short period of time after midnight on January 23rd, the Google Germany homepage was unavailable for some users. We have since corrected the problem, and, while due to internet caching some problems may persist, we anticipate that all users will experience normal functionality of google.de soon, the latest by January 24th.” According to the Register’s inside scoop,

“The google.de domain changed hands three times last night… A request to take over the domain was placed with Goneo about a week ago. The firm automatically placed a request with German domain registry DENIC, which put the request to Google’s German provider. The provider did not respond in the first instance, and ignored a second approach from DENIC. According to procedure, DENIC then approved the request on Monday evening. Goneo became aware of the registration and arranged with Google and DENIC to have it transferred back. Unfortunately, somebody else had made an application to register it too, through another domain company, which had also been ignored, so it was transferred to them first. Google finally took possession of its German digs this morning.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.