Pretty much all sites of a respectable size are targeted on occasion by unknown sources, and today several large sites appear to be hit.

TV-torrent group EZTV told TF that they are dealing with a serious flood of unwanted connections, which renders the site unavailable.

EZTV has currently no indication when the site will return, but they will do all they can to solve the issues as soon as possible.

Around the same time as EZTV’s problems started, KickassTorrents went down too. TorrentFreak asked the Kickass.to team for more information on the outage, but we have yet to hear back.

Whether KickassTorrents’ problems are also DDoS related is unsure at the moment. At the time of writing the site’s DNS servers are not resolving to an IP-address either.

As if that’s not enough, Extratorrent ran into trouble as well. Earlier today the site had some downtime, but a cached version is currently being served through Cloudflare.

We will update this article when more information becomes available.

Update: EZTV has returned, KickassTorrents is still having problems.

Update: Extratorrent is having issues again and released the following statement.

Update: Kickass.to appears to be coming back slowly. The KickassTorrent’s team confirmed to TorrentFreak that they have been dealing with a series of DDoS attacks.

Update: EZTV is down again.

“Extratorrent servers are under strong DDOS attack right now… We are trying to resolve issues. Sorry for inconvenience. Your support is highly appreciated.”

Kickass.to unreachable

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentFreak reached out to the site admin, who informed us that they are suffering from a DDoS attack.

EZTV has currently no indication when the site will return, but they will do all they can to solve the issues as soon as possible.

The downtime doesn’t mean that there are no new releases coming out. As always, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

This is not the first site that was taken down by a DDoS attack this week. Several private trackers suffered the same fate.

Update: EZTV is back

Update: January 12, EZTV is down again

Update: January 14, EZTV is up again

Update: February 6, EZTV is hit by a major DDoS attack again.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There’s no indication how long the outage will last or what is causing it.

Despite the site’s domain name the problems are not related to the Italian crackdown we reported earlier today.

ezRSS and the torrent storage cache Zoink appear to be suffering from the same issue and are down as well.

The outage doesn’t mean that there are no new releases coming out. As always, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

TorrentFreak contacted EZTV for additional information and we’ll update this post when we get a response.

Update: back in action…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the moment there’s no indication how long the outage will last.

ezRSS, Istole.it and the torrent storage cache Zoink are suffering from the same problems and are down as well.

The downtime doesn’t mean that there are no new releases coming out.

As always, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The beginning of the new TV-season is generally speaking the busiest time for EZTV, as over a million people flock to the site every day to catch up with their favorite shows. So when they found that their preferred TV-torrent index wasn’t loading, some people started to worry.

Luckily for them, there is not much to be concerned about.

EZTV’s NovaKing informed TorrentFreak that the downtime is due to hardware issues. They are currently working on replacing old servers with new ones, and when this is done the site will come back. This could take a few more hours up to a few days, depending on how much time the volunteers can free up.

“We recently got new servers to help with the increase in visitors we are getting to the site. With the new setup EZTV and sister sites like ezRSS will be more stable,” NovaKing said.

In recent months EZTV has seen quite an increase in usage, and since the old servers couldn’t keep up this often resulted in downtime. And aside from better up-time, there’s more for EZTV’s users to look forward to.

“The new version of the site is almost complete as well which we hope most people will like and find more useful,” NovaKing told us.

One of the new features currently in development is the integration of ezRSS (which is also down) with EZTV’s “my shows” feature. This means that users can setup an RSS feed for their favorite shows on the EZTV website, and use this feed to automatically download new shows.

The upcoming iteration of the site will also have a revamped forum, improved usability, more detailed show information and an updated TV news system. When these new features will be rolled out is unknown at this point.

Unlike other torrent sites, EZTV is completely advertising free and run entirely by volunteers. All the people working on the site also have real jobs to attend so site maintenance and upgrades sometimes take longer than with other sites. Still, that doesn’t mean that EZTV isn’t publishing content elsewhere.

Update October 5, 2011

EZTV has not made the switch yet and is still facing issues every now and then. The site is down at the moment but the techies are working on bringing it back.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the moment there’s no indication how long the outage will last.

As always, however, the EZTV.it crew will do all it can to solve the issues as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the leading TV-torrent distribution group continues to post torrents on The Pirate Bay and various other sites.

ezRSS and the torrent storage cache Zoink appear to be suffering from the same problems and are down as well.

Update: problems are solved, the site should be back from everyone now, or very soon.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

EZTV is arguably one of the largest BitTorrent communities, so any downtime immediately leads to all kinds of horror stories about raids and seizures.

None of this is true though.

No official explanation is available for the downtime yet, but we’re reliably informed that it’s merely a technical issue.

As always, the EZTV crew will do all it can to solve the issues as soon as possible.

We’ve reached out to the EZTV team and will update this article with an official response when we hear back from them.

Update: The EZTV people told TorrentFreak that it’s a “small hiuccup with DNS.” The site will be back ‘soon’ (within a few days, no ETA).

Update: And they’re back…

Update (May 28): EZTV is suffering downtime again, no word about that’s causing it yet..

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today the group serves more than 16 million visitors a month on its website alone, and a multiple of that on the other torrent sites they distribute their releases on.

Several days ago EZTV’s website suddenly went offline without prior notice, something that usually leads to wild rumors about what the cause. Luckily EZTV’s problems are due to technical problems and they are currently working on a comeback.

EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak that a rebuild of the servers stuffed up and they are currently waiting for some tech people to look into it. It’s not clear when the site will return, but it’s safe to assume that it will be a matter of days, not weeks or months.

This is not the first prolonged outage the popular TV-torrent site has suffered this year. During the summer the website was down for six weeks. It went offline because of hardware problems, but EZTV decided to take advantage of the situation and relocate all hardware to a new datacenter while implementing several new features.

Even though the website is currently offline, EZTV’s releases are still widely available though a number of sites. “You can still get our stuff from Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Twitter and Zoink,” Novaking told TorrentFreak.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Once upon a time there was a popular TV show eD2K link site called The Real World. Of course, it wasn’t long before the site’s popularity caused it have legal problems, and in August 2005 it all came crashing down.

However, just as people recently copied The Pirate Bay when waters started to get choppy, the same thing also happened with The Real World, with the site’s database being shared around on eD2K. Soon after The Free World was born, run by an Austrian national, but that site didn’t last long either and was shut down following MPAA action.

On October 23rd 2005, exactly four years ago today, yet another site came out of the ashes. That site, TV Underground (TVU), remains to this today and claims to be the biggest site for eD2K link TV shows. TVU has a unique feature – it is believed to be the only site to run its very own eD2K server.

“We take pride in running the only P2P server sponsored by the P2P community
and not by some shady porn site,” TVU admin CheGuevara told TorrentFreak. For those interested, stats for the server (currently indexing 8.6million files) can be found here.

While eD2K remains popular, BitTorrent is the current darling of the P2P file-sharing world and is particularly popular with fans of TV shows. This is clearly something the TV Underground team wish to exploit.

“We have launched a new version of our site today to allow users to submit torrents,” CheGuevara told us. “At first we will allow users to submit torrents to seasons that already have eD2K links, but we are planning to expand to torrent-only seasons and per show torrents after the launch.”

So what motivated this development at TVU?

“We love ed2k, but we acknowledge that BitTorrent has it’s own advantages and some users prefer to use that,” they explained.

“Our mission is to spread quality TV Shows to every corner of the world. We think the current system of how the rest of the world has to wait months and years to see a show that has been shown in the US or elsewhere as totally unfair,” CheGuevara notes. “I myself am a big fan of House. It is on Season 6 right now, but where I live they are just only showing Season 4… Fair? No. You get the point.”

TV Underground will have to go a long way in the torrent world to catch up with the likes of EZTV, but with the site currently down because of maintenance, many will be grateful for an alternative.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.