A Man Owned Google.com For About A Minute Due to a Glitch And Google Gave Him a Huge Reward As a Result

BBC - An administration oversight allowed US student Sanmay Ved to buy the right to control the domain on 29 September. The oversight left him in charge of Google.com for about a minute until Google caught on and cancelled the transaction. Now Mr Ved has been given a cash reward for spotting the error, which he has decided to donate to charity. In the early hours of 29 September he noticed a for sale sign next to the Google.com name while browsing sites on Google’s own website-buying service. He used a credit card to pay the $12 (£8) fee to grab google.com and got emails confirming he was the owner. Almost immediately he started getting messages intended for Google’s own web administration team. This was followed by a cancellation message sent by the website buying service which said he could not take over Google.com because someone else had already registered it and his $12 payment was refunded. Now it has emerged that Mr Ved has been given a “bug bounty” by Google’s security team for revealing the weakness in the domain buying system. The internal emails Mr Ved received while in charge of google.com have been passed to this team. Mr Ved decided to give the cash to an Indian educational foundation and in response, Google doubled the reward.

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This Sanmay Ved guy just made the easiest money of his life. He is over there scoping out the Internet for domains to buy and somehow lands on Google.com and snatches it right up. Luckiest guy in the world. What is bullshit though is that they stole it back from him. He bought it fair and square. Not his fault Google listed Google as an available website to buy. This guy should be a billionaire today. No measly little reward should satisfy him.

Imagine the feelings- for a minute he was the richest man in the world. Owned 100% of Google.com. That’s power. The fact they stole it away from him is devastating. Solid move donating all their pity-money to charity. Tax write-off and Google sent him more money. Sure it’s not the billion dollars he deserved, but I guess it’s not a bad ROI for a 4 minute time of his life. I’m guessing it was decent enough money too.

The most unlucky thing about this whole thing is it was Google, not Comcast. If it was Comcast he would still own them today. They’d have no idea. He’d probably try and call someone at Comcast and end up on hold and passed around department to department talking to 8 different Kumars. Eventually he’d have to say fuck it and show up in a suit for work the next day.