DETROIT, MI – In the cyber world, Wayne County ceased to exist for much of Tuesday. Oops. The registration for the county website's domain name expired, and no one renewed it. Anyone who tried to log onto the page — say taxpayers like Glenda Jones who wanted to pay her taxes — was met with an error message.

WDIV-TV said its reporters were first told by county officials that the error message resulted from a "technical issue," but later confessed to the lapse in a statement that read; "The county's IT department failed to timely renew the county's domain name. It has now been renewed."