I don't use GoDaddy, but I have been forced to use it in the past because I had clients who used it. They suck in a lot of ways but in this case they definitely sent repeated messages about this before the one that the poster found from 2h before the cutoff. I got similar messages from various registrars often multiple per month for many months prior to the cutoff date. It is much easier to believe that this poster just didn't see them because they flagged one or more of the many spammy messages from Godaddy and got all their messages sent to the spam box. If they had logged into GoDaddy during the previous 6 months, they would have also been prompted by a popup, which would likely have been dismissed because it looks just like the hundreds of marketing prompts you are bombarded with every time you log into GoDaddy.