Oh for the love of God...

As a website developer and website hosting provider, I'm speechless:

D'Oh! D.C. Health Link allows its Web domain to expire

The domain name for D.C. Health Link's website was allowed to expire for 49 minutes earlier this week.

A D.C. website development company discovered the problem Tuesday morning as it tried to use D.C. Health Link's web page for its own employees' coverage. D.C. Health Link, the District's Affordable Care Act exchange, is operated by the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority and has come under fire recently for technical and usability issues.

I can't even...

(sigh) For those who aren't familiar with how domain name registrations work, renewing one takes literally seconds to do, only has to be done once per year, costs a whopping $10 or so per year, and can easily be set up to either autorenew every year or you can register the domain for up to 10 years at a time.

No getting around it: This was a very silly and embarrassing mistake, though it's also true that the actual expiration doesn't happen for 30 days after the official date (generally the domain will go into a sort of "limbo" status where the registrant doesn't own it but no one else can do so either, giving the registrant time to retrieve it...for an extra fee).