Swedish BitTorrent website ThePirateBay has been experiencing some downtime recently. Unfortunately, no one seems to know why the site is down.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
Whenever Swedish BitTorrent website ThePirateBay goes down, many start panicking and asking if the site was raided again or if authorities have blocked the site. We are aware of multiple people in multiple countries being unable to access the site, so it can’t be regional downtime or site blockage at the ISP.
Unfortunately, that’s about as much as we are aware of the situation at this point in time. It’s entirely possible that there’s some simple downtime. We are aware of the previous incident of downtime involving a DDOS attacker, however, the last tweet of this individual dates clear back to the 18th. So, it’s quite possibly not a DDOS attack from this individual.
We’ll let you know more as we learn details of this particular downtime.
In the mean time, you can check out our list of BitTorrent websites in the ZeroPaid BitTorrent section if you need a fast alternative.
Update: We pinged both the server and the domain name. Both pings timed out on our end. This means you can rule out a DNS issue at least, but that still opens the door to a whole host of other possibilities.
Update 2: We’ve surveyed various organizations representing rightsholders and no one has talked about the sites downtime. Normally, if a site this big goes down because of their doing, a press release, I’d think, would have been issued by now. If it was somehow the result of the activities of these organizations, they certainly aren’t talking at this point.
Update 3: For those who want a fast list of alternatives, you can check out some of our choices here.
Update 4: We’ve been noticing several websites are down at this hour due to the massive storms going on in the US. However, The Pirate Bay is obviously not located in the US and it is down for everyone. I don’t see how there could be any connection at this point.
Update 5: A theory has been going around that there’s been a large number of Linux servers have been crashing recently. Some are pointing to the infamous leap second causing the problems. Of course, this is only a theory at this point.
Update 6: ZeroPaid has confirmed it was a server issue that crashed The Pirate Bay. Specifically, it was the leap second that did it. You can read our updated article article here.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
