It looks like the Fyre Festival’s domain name, FyreFestival.com, is now in auction at DropCatch.com. If you visit FyreFestival.com, you will be automatically redirected to the auction page, where the high bid is currently $320 with 2 days to go. You can see this was the domain name used by the festival as it is referenced on the Fyre Festival Facebook page (screenshot above).
Interestingly, based on historical Whois records at DomainTools, it does not look like the domain name went through a standard “domain name life cycle.” In May of this year, the Whois record shows that FyreFestival.com was set to expire in November of 2018. For some unknown reason, the domain name seems to have expired prior to when it was supposed to expire in 2018.
A current Whois record shows the domain name now has a creation date of August 8, 2017, which would explain why it is up for auction via DropCatch.com.
I reached out to a representative from GoDaddy to ask what happened to the domain name that would have caused it to expire in the manner it did. Unfortunately, the company was unable to comment due to its privacy policy. As a result, I am not really sure what happened to the domain name.
As you may recall, the Fyre Festival was a music and lifestyle festival scheduled to take place in the Bahamas earlier this year. There were major issues, and it seems to have gone down in flames (pun intended). You can read more about the Fyre Festival here, here, and here.
It will be interesting to see who ends up acquiring the domain name and how it will subsequently be used. Because many lawsuits have been filed, perhaps a law firm representing one of the complainants will buy it to post updates about the progress of the litigation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this domain name sell for mid to low four figures.
The circumstances around Tioga.com are similar to your example above. It was set to expire November 2017 – for several years out actually. The domain had been registered at GoDaddy since 1998 – did not go through the normal GoDaddy expiring auction process, dropped on Monday and then was picked up by NJ/Snap. It’s in auction now, highest bid at $4999 with a couple days left.
It’s as if the registrant cancelled the domain and GoDaddy just let it go.
Likely a force delete by the registrant, which can be done directly in your account at GoDaddy. I think it takes 5 days from doing so, to be released from the registry. It’s also a tactic to use if you wish not to let GoDaddy profit from your expired domains. https://www.godaddy.com/help/cancel-my-domain-412
Sorry for the off-topic comment, Elliot, but it looks like your blog’s RSS feed stopped working. The latest post it’s showing is from August 1. Possibly related to the recent SSL installation?
Will check that out. It’s strange because I am still receiving the daily email generated by Feedburner.
Thanks for letting me know!
Apparently Google (Feedburner) does not allow https feeds.
Force delete to release as much liability as they can. They want nothing to do with that fiasco.