During this time the site has established itself as one of the leading BitTorrent search engines and currently serves millions of users a day.

Over the years isoHunt has made the headlines on several occasions due to its legal battles with Hollywood and the major record labels. Both cases are still ongoing, but right now isoHunt founder Gary Fung has more pressing matters on his mind.

For the past few hours the site has been unreachable to the public, and as a result many users have started to wonder whether something bad has happened to the site.

While the site is indeed in trouble, Fung informs TorrentFreak that the problems being faced are of a technical nature.

The downtime is being caused by significant problems with isoHunt’s database. In addition, the server encountered a bad kernel which complicates matters further. As a result it may take a while before the site comes back online.

Fung assures TorrentFreak that the site will return, but that it will take at least 12 hours before the current issues are completely resolved.

isoHunt will post updates via Facebook and Twitter and has also posted a notice on the site’s homepage to keep visitors informed, although not everybody is able to see that at the moment.

In the meantime isoHunt users longing for their daily fix will have to wait, or visit any of the many other torrent sites around.

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

After being denied an invite to the private BitTorrent tracker What.cd, he or she went on a rampage, hitting half a dozen BitTorrent sites with DDoS attacks.

The initial targets were private BitTorrent trackers and these have all since come back online. However, it appears that the DDoS attacks are not over yet. A few hours ago Zeiko shifted his aim towards public BitTorrent sites.

On Twitter thepiratebay.se was announced as the new target and not long thereafter the most-visited BitTorrent site did indeed go offline.

The first attack started about 9 hours ago, and The Pirate Bay eventually recovered, but went offline again after the second attack was announced.

The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are indeed suffering from a SYN flood that originates from a small botnet. Nothing new for the BitTorrent site, who have decided to make use of the unexpected downtime by doing some maintenance on The Pirate Bay’s backend.

“It’s just a normal SYN flood from a small botnet,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak

“We’re taking the break to do some much-needed database upgrades. The site will come back as soon as we’re done with that.”

Last month The Pirate Bay moved its operation to the cloud so it’s better able to withstand outside attacks. Although cloud hosting does makes it easier for the site to recover from hardware failure and even a police raid, it is still hard to withstand DDoS attacks.

Despite the occasional downtime The Pirate Bay continues to expand its user base. It’s nearing the list of 50 most visited sites on the Internet and is currently ranked 13th in Sweden.

Update: The Pirate Bay is back again.

Update: isoHunt and Fenopy are targeted as well. The first is down at the time of writing.

Update: The Pirate Bay is down again and isoHunt is back in Europe.

Update: Bitsnoop is down as well.

Update: TorrentPortal and 1337x are offline as well.

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