Was there some sort of assurance that nothing was going to happen when the contract expired, and this expectation was changed? Freenom hasn’t been registering domains since Jan 1.
It’s seeming a little odd to me that this is catching people with their pants down.
There was also news today about a change in Mali that affected US military emails that were sent to .ml instead of .mil. I didn’t read the whole article so I don’t know if that was real or clickbait.
It was real, but totally unrelated to this.