Having your domain name expire is pretty high on the list of most embarrassing things to cause issues. The reality of the situation is that registering a domain comes quite early in a company's history, before you have some of the information management systems in place. In our case, the reminder emails went to a single individual, who somehow managed to miss them. We have changed the contact details, and will be doing a post-mortem to make sure similar scenarios are covered in our integration tests.

It certainly doesn't indicate any lack of care for the reliability of the service. It's simply the result of a ridiculous administrative failing.

I am very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

This is a huge indicator, IMHO, that they don't really believe in their service and don't even do the absolute minimum that's required for keeping it up.

Worse, depending on the type of message I'm passing through them, this might have privacy or security implications as messages will now be sent to a non-related third party.

Stuff like this is why I personally am very, very careful before outsourcing any part of my core infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/pusher/status/341136374243659776