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.

The problem appears to be limited to the United States, Canada and Brazil.

Kat.ph returns no DNS records at all in these regions, but it’s unsure what’s causing the trouble.

TorrentFreak asked the KickassTorrents team for an explanation and we will update this article when we hear back.

Some of the KickassTorrents proxies appear to work just fine.

Update: The problem is being resolved, slowly.

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

People all around the world are unable to access the second most visited torrent site since an hour or so.

TorrentFreak contacted the admins to ask for an explanation, but we have yet to hear back from them.

Interestingly, KickassTorrents either shows a “bad gateway” message or it redirects to the PH registry website with a notice that the domain is still available.

The Whois data reveals that Kat.ph expired a few days ago on January 12. It’s likely that this has something to do with the current downtime.

We will update this post when new information arrives.

Update: The Come.in proxy operated by KAT is also experiencing some outages. A few people report that KAT still works for them.

Update 2: The KAT admins told TorrentFreak that they hope to come back soon. “Technical issues. Should be solved soon.”

Update 3 KickassTorrents is still accessible via the old KickassTorrents.com domain.

Update 4 All fixed!

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

Even though the site was only founded last year, it has quickly gown out to be one of the leading BitTorrent sites with millions of visits every month. Hosted in the Ukraine, the site has been free from trouble in its relatively short life, until now that is.

Starting two days ago, regular visitors of the torrent site noticed that KickassTorrents was unreachable. Although the site has been down for a few hours in the past due to maintenance, worries started to grow as time went on.

In an attempt to find out what was going on, TorrentFreak contacted the site’s founder, who informed us that the Ukrainian authorities were the reason for the prolonged downtime.

“Kickasstorrents.com main web server was shut down by the hosting provider after it was contacted by local authorities. We don’t have many details right now but it seems that there was no direct threat or order to shut down the site, just ‘concerns’ about the site’s activities,” the site’s founder told us.

“One way or another I’m afraid we must say goodbye to Ukraine and move the servers to other countries,” he added. TorrentFreak was further informed that the site should return in a few days once the site has moved the operation to a new location.

KickassTorrents was hosted by Mhost in the Ukraine, who voluntarily shut down the site after the local Government voiced its concerns about the site. The exact nature of the concerns are not known by the founder of KickassTorrents, but he told us that leaving the Ukraine is in the best interest of all parties involved.

Thus far many torrent sites have operated peacefully in the Ukraine, but the current events might indicate that times are changing, and not for the better. There is no official statement from the authorities but we assume that the concerns are copyright related.

We will post an update if more information becomes available.

Update: And they’re back…

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