On July 25, 2017, at 4:25am Pacific, marketers around the world woke up to chaos.
Forms weren't submitting. Tracking links were dead. Landing pages vanished. Email campaigns pointed to parking pages. And nobody could figure out why.
The culprit wasn't a sophisticated cyberattack or a catastrophic server failure. It was a $35 invoice that never got paid.
Marketo — the billion-dollar marketing automation platform used by thousands of enterprises — had let its domain expire.
What Actually Happened
Marketo.com was registered through Network Solutions. Like most companies, they had auto-renewal enabled. And like most companies, they assumed that meant they were covered.
They weren't.
Somewhere in the process, the auto-renewal failed. The domain slipped into "pending deletion" status. And within hours, DNS servers around the world started returning the wrong answer for marketo.com.
Traffic that should have reached Marketo's servers was instead redirected to Confluence Networks — a domain parking service. The company's website, email servers, and every customer-facing integration vanished from the internet.
The Blast Radius
Here's what made the Marketo outage particularly brutal: it didn't just affect Marketo.
Marketo's platform works by embedding tracking scripts, forms, and landing pages into customer websites. When marketo.com went down, every one of those integrations broke instantly.
- Website forms stopped working across thousands of client sites
- Tracking pixels returned errors, breaking analytics
- Landing pages hosted on Marketo subdomains disappeared
- Email links in active campaigns pointed to a parking page
- Marketo employees couldn't even receive email — their mail servers were unreachable
One company's domain expiration became thousands of companies' customer-facing crisis.
The $35 Fix
Late that night, CEO Steve Lucas sent an apologetic email to customers:
"We renew thousands of domain name properties we own every year with precision, yet the auto renew process for registering our main domain, Marketo.com, failed."
But here's the twist: a customer actually paid Marketo's renewal fee for them.
A good samaritan, seeing the chaos unfold, went to Network Solutions and paid the $35 to renew the domain. Even so, it took nearly two days for DNS changes to propagate globally and for services to fully recover.
Two days of downtime. Thousands of affected businesses. Untold revenue lost. All because of a $35 renewal that slipped through the cracks.
Why Auto-Renew Isn't Enough
The instinct after reading this is to check your own domains and make sure auto-renew is on. That's a good instinct. But it misses the point.
Marketo had auto-renew enabled. It failed anyway.
Auto-renewal can fail for dozens of reasons:
- Expired credit card on file with the registrar
- Billing address mismatch triggers fraud detection
- Email notifications go to an inbox nobody monitors
- Registrar errors or processing delays
- Domain transfers that reset renewal settings
The uncomfortable truth is that auto-renew is a single point of failure. And for something as critical as your primary domain, a single point of failure isn't good enough.
The Real Lesson
Marketo's outage wasn't caused by negligence. They managed thousands of domains successfully. They had processes in place. They just didn't have visibility into what was about to fail.
The domains that expire aren't the ones you're actively thinking about. They're the ones you set up years ago and assumed were handled. They're the ones where the renewal notice went to someone who left the company. They're the ones where "auto-renew" gave you false confidence.
The fix isn't to care more about domain renewals. The fix is to have an independent system watching them for you — one that alerts you before expiration, regardless of what your registrar says.
Don't Be the Next Marketo
Your domain is the foundation everything else sits on. Your SSL certificates, your DNS, your email, your customer trust — all of it depends on that domain staying active.
Lapse monitors your domains, SSL certificates, and other critical expiry dates independently of your registrar. You'll get alerts 90, 30, and 7 days before anything expires — so you're never surprised by a $35 mistake that costs you millions.
Don't let your organization become the next cautionary tale. Start your free trial and get control of your expiring assets today.