Argentina loses country's Google domain after random citizen buys it for $5

An Argentinian for a mere price of US $5.81 ( 540 Argentine Peso) bought the ownership of the country's Google domain on Wednesday night. 

The domain was reportedly made available after the previous owner's license expired on the same day. The search engine google.com.ar was temporarily shut down as a result, reports News Week. 

"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!" tweeted Nicolas Kuroña, the alleged culprit.

As per MercoPress, this type of action is known as "Cybersquatting," which refers to the act of holding, registering, purchasing, or selling a domain in order to benefit from the rightful owner's name recognition.

It's likely that Google Argentina actually forgot to renew the domain google.com.ar, and Kuroña saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. "It is all legal!!," Kuroña tweeted.

MarcoPress announced minutes after this operation that Google Argentina had successfully recovered its domain and had quickly restored service to users across the region.

In a Reddit thread about the incident, one user commented, "Whether it was a glitch or truly expired seems to be up for debate here."

Either way Google users in Argentina complained about the website being down for almost three hours and assumed a crash in the server, according to MercoPress. But Kuroña's tweet helped to clear things up later on.

Another user tweeted screenshots of the website being down, blaming nic.ar.

"This happens because nic.ar is SO SO SO bad that it doesn't support automatic renewals or multi-year buy like most domain registrations in the world," he tweeted.

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

Newsweek reached out to Google who said they could not comment on the incident at this time.