The services, which were listed as number one and two in our latest list of most-used trackers, coordinate the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.

This means that the trackers handle a staggering three billion connections per day – each.

However, starting a few days ago the trackers stopped working entirely. While the trackers have had their fair share of downtime in the past, it’s not often that both of the top trackers are offline for more than a day. Needless to say, this caused concern among some of the most avid file-sharers.

PBT and OBT down

To find out more TF contacted the owner of OpenBitTorrent, who told us that the current downtime is intentional. The tracker is replacing some hardware, a process that could take a week or more to complete. In any event, there is no doubt that the tracker will continue business as usual in the near future.

We also reached out to PublicBitTorrent, whose owner confirmed they are also working on maintenance issues. There is currently no ETA for when the tracker will return, but the current downtime will continue for several days at least.

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. In fact, the majority of BitTorrent users probably failed to notice the downtime to begin with.

Instead of using a tracker, most downloads work fine when they rely solely on DHT and PEX, which allows downloaders to get info on other peers from each other, instead of a central tracker. This works just fine in most situations, especially for popular files.

The downtime is most problematic for users of BitTorrent proxy services. These often advise users to disable DHT and PEX to prevent their real IP-addresses from leaking out, so unless a torrent has other working trackers, nothing can be downloaded for the time being.

For users of proxy services there is no other option than to wait until the trackers return. Meanwhile, udp://tracker.istole.it:80/announce is the largest BitTorrent tracker that’s still online.

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

TorrentFreak contacted the operator of the tracker who informed us that the downtime is related to an increasing number of users. The servers are simply overloaded and can’t handle all requests. We were ensured that the problems will be dealt with but it is expected that this might take a few days.

As a direct result of the problems at OpenBitTorrent, the only other major tracker PublicBitTorrent had to deal with many extra users, again causing trouble. This week, PublicBitTorrent has been unresponsive for half of the time as their servers are overloaded as well. This is a prime example of how vulnerable the BitTorrent tracker ecosystem is.

The operator of PublicBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that extra servers are on the way. Hopefully this will solve the problems, but it is expected to take up to a week before everything’s setup properly.

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. Instead of using a tracker, most downloads work fine when they solely rely on DHT and PEX. Hopefully, both trackers will be fully functioning by the end of next week.

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

The Pirate Bay’s prominence has been the Achilles’ heel of BitTorrent. If the tracker should fail today, hundreds of thousands of torrents would begin to slow down significantly or stop working entirely. With the upcoming sale of The Pirate Bay this weakness has become even more salient.

Good and stable alternatives are needed, and luckily some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community realize this. Last week we already reported on OpenBitTorrent, a free service that is already tracking 1,828,973 torrents for more than 20 million peers.

Still, replacing one tracker with another wont add much redundancy. The founder of BTjunkie and another major torrent sites came to the same conclusion and decided to launch a tracker of their own – PublicBitTorrent. Similar to OBT, PublicBT uses the Beerware licensed Opentracker software.

“Me and others felt that too much of BitTorrent tracking relies on one group and we would like to share some of that responsibility,” BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak. “If anything were to happen to TPB, hundreds of thousands of torrents that are only tracked by TPB could be lost,” he added.

PublicBT has just launched, and although the site was almost entirely copied (without authorization) from the OBT website, it is operated independently. To get the ball rolling all torrents on BTjunkie will soon be updated with the new OBT and PBT trackers, BTjunkie’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Operating a standalone BitTorrent tracker, especially one that tracks millions of peers, can be a costly project but is a prerequisite for the BitTorrent ecosystem. It’s good to see that more BitTorrent site admins stepping up to take responsibility.

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