🔥 The Incident: Google.com Bought by Mistake
Date: September 29, 2015
Person: Sanmay Ved, a former Google employee
What happened:
Sanmay Ved was browsing Google Domains, and to his surprise, he saw that google.com was available for purchase — even though it's one of the most valuable domain names in the world.
He bought it for just $12 USD!
For a brief moment, Sanmay had access to Google's domain control panel, including settings, email forwarding, and other backend tools.
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🛑 What Happened Next?
Within a minute, Google canceled the transaction and took the domain back.
Google explained that the domain became available due to a glitch during a transition process between domain registrars.
They refunded Sanmay’s $12 — and later offered him a reward.
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💰 The Reward
Google gave Sanmay a bug bounty reward of $6,006.13 — which spells "Google" in numbers.
Sanmay donated the money to charity.
Google then doubled the amount, bringing the total to over $12,000 USD donated.
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✅ Why Is This Famous?
Because it proves even tech giants can make huge domain management mistakes — and also because a former employee managed to “own” Google.com for a few minutes legally!
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