Google is one of the leading names in the tech industry. One can say that the brand enjoys unchallenged success. But a piece of recent news has baffled us all where a young man from Buenos Aires stopped Google Argentina’s operation for some time.
Apparently, the 30-year-old, Nicolas Kuroña bought the domain ‘Google.com.ar’ for just ₹200 (£2.08). All with legal proceedings. This made Google Argentina’s entire web presence across the country down for a couple of hours last Wednesday, briefly redirected the control to Nicolas.
Giving an official statement to BBC, Google Argentina admitted that for the short term, the domain was acquired by someone else. The company further added that it had regained control of the domain almost instantly.
Nicolas did explain what made him buy the domain in the first place and exactly how he did that. He said that it happened when he was working on designing a website for a client at his desk. Through social media, he got to know that Google was down. He tried getting through google.com.ar but it just didn’t work.
Esto es lo que vi el día que compre el dominio de https://t.co/cK20BdyuxB, gracias por el apoyo !! pic.twitter.com/hYsVcEoLLj
— Nicolas David Kuroña (@Argentop) April 23, 2021
Curious to know why was Google down, he went on to the Network Information Center Argentina (NIC) which is the organization responsible for operating the .ar country code domains. To his surprise, when he searched for Google, it showed that Argentina’s Google domain was available for purchase.
He decided to try and purchase it but was not sure if it would even work. After filling in the necessary details and going through the payment process online, Nicolas received an invoice for the purchase which made it all real and shocked him too. Nicolas shared the invoice with BBC which checks out his story.
He even tweeted the incident online and explained that it was not his intention to harm anyone and did not believe that the purchase will actually go through.
Quiero aclarar que entre a https://t.co/XtzUy8WL36 vi el nombre de https://t.co/cK20BdyuxB disponible y lo compre legalmente como corresponde!
— Nicolas David Kuroña (@Argentop) April 22, 2021
His tweet roughly translates to, “I want to clarify that I enter http://nic.ar I saw the name of http://google.com.ar available and I bought it legally as appropriate!”
To say that Nicolas was shocked by what happened would be an understatement. He did not expect it to work. After he bought the domain, millions of people searching on Google.com.ar were actually coming right to him.
There can be only one explanation to how this happened which is that Google had forgotten to renew its domain name. However, the company has stated its license for the domain hadn’t expired and was not due to expire until July 2021. Google is now investigating what led to these events.
