Nicolas Kuroña Briefly Owned Google Argentina, Before He Lost It

This happened on one Wednesday night.

A citizen in Argentina went online to buy a domain name from a registrar in his country, but found that the domain google.com/ar was up for sale. Surprised by this incident, he quickly purchased the ownership of his country's Google domain for 540 Argentine Peso, or around $5.

"I want to clarify that I entered http://nic.ar I saw the name of http://google.com.ar available and I legally bought it accordingly!" Nicolás David Kuroña, the alleged culprit, tweeted.

It was reported that the Argentinian Google domain was available after its previous ownership expired, and this caused a temporary closedown of the search engine when accessed through google.com.ar.

His purchase of the domain name didn't affect google.com or any other Google domains.

What Kuroña did, was "cybersquatting," which refers to the act of holding, registering, buying or selling a domain in order to profit from the rightful owner.

In this case, Google Argentina simply forgot to set renew the domain google.com.ar, or set the domain renewal to automatic.

As a result, during the extremely short lapse, Kuroña saw the chance and took it.

"It is all legal!!," Kuroña tweeted.

Unfortunately for Kuroña, he was only able to own the Google Argentina domain for mere minutes.

Google was quick and realized this mishap.

Realizing that its search engine in Argentina was down, and finding out that someone acquired its domain name for the country, the company successfully recovered its domain from Kuroña.

Soon later, it restored all of its services to all of its users across the country.

In all, Google Argentina was down for almost three hours.

Google Search is by far, the biggest, the largest, and the most recognizable brands on the planet.

Its name has even been made a verb.

So when it's suddenly inaccessible for a country of 45 million people, people will notice.

When people in the country began questioning whether there was a server crash in the server, it was Kuroña's tweet that helped to public realized what was going on and cleared things up later on.

Following this case, some Twitter users blamed nic.rar for this. The site that was used by Kuroña to purchase google.com/ar doesn't support automatic renewals or multi-year buy like most domain registrations in the world.

The nic.ar site was also down as well on Wednesday after users discovered the incident through social media.

Later reports suggest that Kuroña managed to buy the Argentinian Google domain because of a glitch in a standard registrar, OpenDataCordoba. It was reported that the domain name is set to expire on July 2021, meaning that Kuroña shouldn't be able to purchase it, if it wasn't for the glitch.