Argentinian buys Google’s domain name for £2

Designer living in Buenos Aires says he snapped up google.com.ar after noticing it available in registry

Google's entire web presence in Argentina was last week briefly redirected to the website of a 30-year-old designer who bought the company's domain name for just 2.

Nicolas Kurona, a resident of Buenos Aires, says he noticed that the company's services were down when he began receiving messages from friends on WhatsApp. But rather than doing what many would have, and shrugging before returning to work - or taking the outage as a sign to have a tea break - he headed to the Argentinian domain name registry, NIC Argentina, to see if he could work out the cause.