On the 8th, it was serving an error page from centos.
On the 9th, it was serving the new content. https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup for zombo.com shows that it was updated on 2026-02-09 20:34:17 UTC
I believe that a more reasonable explanation would be that the domain name expired, someone saw that being the case, bought the domain name and hosted their own version of it.
I'm not sure that "stolen" is the proper verb to use, or that "hacker" is the appropriate attribution.
The current registration occurred in 1999. Typically, domain registrations are extended in yearly multiples, which can be seen by the fact that it expires on October 10th, the same day that it was registered.
If it expired in 2025, then that expiration would have occurred in October.
That said, you are probably correct that it wasn't a hacker as such. GoDaddy was indeed offering it for sale in February, according to a Reddit thread from that month[0]. That makes me wonder why...
That’s what the current page claims, legitimate registration by “New Management”.
> Welcome to… New Management. This domain was purchased openly via GoDaddy. We come in peace (and with a wallet): we’d love to also purchase the rights to the former site's content to help revive the infinite. Until then, everything here is new & unique. Old content rights owners, please reach out. Anything is possible.
And transferred it away? Registrars make it really hard to do that if you're not the actual person. I'm finding it hard to believe someone can do this anonymously.
Registration expires, someone snaps it up immediately. It happened to a customer of mine with a domain that was their name. It pointed at a page saying it was available for sale for $4000.
If your credit card is current. One of the "oh, this gets into trouble" is when you do a 10 year registration paid in advance and the credit card on file expires before the auto-renewal time.
The registrar will poke you, and put up warnings when you log into the server to check on your account that your auto renewal is coming up soon and the card on file has expired.
But if you're not paying attention to your domain registrations, or the renewal reminder emails get sent to the spam folder, or you've lost access to the original email address that you had to register it a decade ago, then godaddy is quite happy to put up a lander page with some inflated price on it and sell it to someone else.
In the first week of February, the site was down.
On the 8th, it was serving an error page from centos.
On the 9th, it was serving the new content. https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup for zombo.com shows that it was updated on 2026-02-09 20:34:17 UTC
I believe that a more reasonable explanation would be that the domain name expired, someone saw that being the case, bought the domain name and hosted their own version of it.
I'm not sure that "stolen" is the proper verb to use, or that "hacker" is the appropriate attribution.
It's possible to tell from an rdap call that this isn't the case:
The current registration occurred in 1999. Typically, domain registrations are extended in yearly multiples, which can be seen by the fact that it expires on October 10th, the same day that it was registered.If it expired in 2025, then that expiration would have occurred in October.
That said, you are probably correct that it wasn't a hacker as such. GoDaddy was indeed offering it for sale in February, according to a Reddit thread from that month[0]. That makes me wonder why...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/oldinternet/comments/1qy566h/is_zom...
> Welcome to… New Management. This domain was purchased openly via GoDaddy. We come in peace (and with a wallet): we’d love to also purchase the rights to the former site's content to help revive the infinite. Until then, everything here is new & unique. Old content rights owners, please reach out. Anything is possible.
[1]: https://html5zombo.com/
If you otherwise have a copyright claim to the name that's a separate issue.
The registrar will poke you, and put up warnings when you log into the server to check on your account that your auto renewal is coming up soon and the card on file has expired.
But if you're not paying attention to your domain registrations, or the renewal reminder emails get sent to the spam folder, or you've lost access to the original email address that you had to register it a decade ago, then godaddy is quite happy to put up a lander page with some inflated price on it and sell it to someone else.
https://github.com/Jonty/zombocom/
https://welcometozombo.com
I ... honestly have very limited grounds for complaint here.
Had to check... but this is still here https://dack.com/web/bullshit.html