Almost certainly loads of people noticed, just no-one with both the motivation and funding to do anything about it.
One of the downsides of your website being down is that it's really hard for anyone to get to the "Contact Us" form on your website and let you know about it.
What was expired was the domain `transl.in`. Perhaps that was set up just for NFC/QR links or something? Maybe other "short url" use?
That is not the main domain or website for Translink, the public transit authority for the state of Queensland. Which is at https://translink.com.au/, with a "contact us" link at the top.
If Translink's entire web presence had disappeared, due to a domain renewal problem or anything else, I am confident it would have been noticed and fixed quickly. It's the public transit authority for the whole dang state!
It's possible(? not very likely?) there are QR and/or NFC using customers who without QR/NFC links working can't figure out any other way to contact Translink to let them know.
I think it's also possible that few actually use QR codes/NFC links.
> It's possible(? not very likely?) there are QR and/or NFC using customers who without QR/NFC links working can't figure out any other way to contact Translink to let them know.
More "can't be arsed" than "can't figure out". That's enough of a hurdle to prevent me spending my time fixing someone else's domain renewal problem when I can't even be bothered renewing my own ones.
Indeed,I wonder how long this went without anyone noticing, because if nobody felt like spending the energy to report it for a long time, it suggests it wasn't important enough to any users to bother, or there weren't hardly any users.
If it's a service that lots of people depend on and find valuable, some of them are going to bother googling a web page and hitting "contact us" link to report it.
One of the downsides of your website being down is that it's really hard for anyone to get to the "Contact Us" form on your website and let you know about it.