It is rumored that the Google.de site was down for several hours, and the the cause was that Google forgot to renew the domain. As Techcrunch reports:

Reports are coming in from Germany that Google.de was down “for many hours” yesterday, and has now gone live again. We’re trying to confirm the reason, but it appears to be because Google forgot to renew the Google.de domain name. It expired and someone registered it. While the site was down the site showed a standard domain name registrar parked page (probably including Google Ads).
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I want to stress that this is an unconfirmed story at this point. If anyone has any additional information, please pass it on. A screen shot of the site when it was down would be ideal.

It would seem that even big-brotheresque leviathans don't see everything all of the time.