A tech-savvy man has bought Google’s Argentinian domain name for just £2.
For a short while last Wednesday Nicolas Kurona was in charge of the website Google.com.ar.
The 30-year-old was sitting at his desk close to Buenos Aires when someone messaged him to say Google was down.
He typed in the address into his browser and it didn’t work, so he logged onto Network Information Center Argentina, which looks after .ar codes.
When the web designer searched for the website there, he found it was available for purchase.
Sceptical but curious, he followed the steps to purchase the website and then received an email.
It showed that he had bought google.com.ar for 270 pesos (£2.08)
“I never imagined that it was going to allow me to buy it,” he told the BBC.
When he typed the domain name into the search bar and pressed enter his personal data appeared.
“When the purchase process was completed and my data appeared, I knew that something was going to happen… I was really anxious,” he said.
Nicolas decided to tweet about what had happened, to explain the situation and how it occurred.
The domain is now back in Google’s hands.
“For a short term, the domain was acquired by someone else,” a spokesperson for the company said.
It is not clear how Nicolas was able to buy the domain.
Theories circulating online that Google had forgotten to renew it turned out not to be true, as the licence runs until 2021.
The company says it is investigating what happened and how a man called Nicholas suddenly came to be in control of Argentina’s most visited website.