Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Blocked for Russians
According to reports coming in to TorrentFreak and tests carried out by us, we can report that Demonoid has been inaccessible to Russian users for at least a day. It appears that for many other countries it is business as usual – Demonoid works just fine.
Demonoid, one of the biggest torrent sites around today, is hosted to the west of Russia in neighboring Ukraine, although relations between the two countries aren’t exactly neighborly at the moment.
In the past 24 hours, TorrentFreak received a flurry of reports that users of Demonoid in Russia could no longer access the site. After checking with some of our own Russian contacts and testing via a server located in St Petersburg, we are able to confirm that at least so far, accessing Demonoid is impossible from Russia. Reports suggest the problem started a day ago.
Traceroutes carried out from several locations across the country to Demonoid’s IP at 62.149.24.66 show that they are all terminating at ColoCall, the biggest data center in Ukraine – just one step away from Demonoid’s servers.
TorrentFreak’s tests from both European and Russian IP addresses both routed through the ColoCall IP 62.149.2.108 – the Russian test was blocked at that point while the European one completed perfectly. Tests by a Russian BitTorrent user on our behalf confirmed it was necessary to use a proxy for both the site and the the tracker to gain access.
It’s hoped that the blockage is temporary and a technical issue but of course, Demonoid has blocked countries before. TorrentFreak has contacted ColoCall but thus far, we’ve received no response.
We’ll update this post when more information comes in.
Update: Several reports coming in that Ukranian IP addresses may also be blocked.
