Can’t make this up: Zombie .ORG domains were recently allowed to be registered, after a glitch at the PIR registry created duplicate registrations.
Several domain registrars were affected by the zombie domain glitch, one of which was Dynadot.
According to their part of the story, PIR allowed the registration of domains that were about to drop, but which were still very much registered:
“There was an error with PIR on a bunch of domains (approximately 100 through us, not sure how many w/ other Registrars).
They allowed some Registrars to “register” domains that were already registered. I’m not sure how the Engineering of that would work as it relates to who would be able to set Name Servers and so on, but in that case, PIR deleted the domains from our Registrar.”
Some domain investors were furious, including one who briefly owned the domain jewlery.org – a common typo – only to have it removed from his account, by the PIR registry.
Technically, the domain was never in his account, because it was still registered at the time of this zombie registration. Adding insult to injury, another domain investor and NamePros member, caught it at the drop a few hours later. 😀
You can read an entertaining summary of this incident here.
