Panic ensued over The Pirate Bay going down. The problem for about two hours was that no one knew why until now. It turns out, the infamous leap second is to blame for the Pirate Bay going down.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
Everyone has been searching long and hard, trying to figure out why The Pirate Bay went down. Now, a staff member for the BitTorrent website has said that the leap second was to blame:
TPB crashed just after midnight June 30th GMT (5.5 hrs ago)
The crash appears to have been caused by the leap second that was issued at midnight.
Due to a bug in the NTP daemon, this has caused crashes of Debian based Linux machines all over the world.
TPB will be back as soon as we can get a sober admin to fix the problem.
So, it wasn’t a DDOS attack or a raid of any kind after all. Just a technical issue. You can read up on some of the coverage of the leap second on Slashdot.
Special thanks to eagle-eyed ZeroPaid reader MsNobody for finding the problem.
Update: Some reports suggest that staff from The Pirate Bay have changed their minds and are now blaming a server move for the downtime instead of the leap second glitch which took down numerous other websites.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
