Reports are coming in from Germany that Google.de was down “for many hours” yesterday. We’re trying to confirm the reason, but it appears to be because Google forgot to renew the Google.de domain name. It expired and someone registered it. While the site was down the site showed a standard domain name registrar parked page.

Some interesting comments on this topic from other blogs:

How did the site that parked the domain give in so easily…I would have expected an attempt to make a fortune out of this situation. Or is it possible?

I find this crazy. How can Google with so many domains in its control, not have a robust system of renewals? How can the registrar having Google as a client, not alert Google on phone, in case email did not work?

More after the jump

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