Every time The Pirate Bay suffers a few minutes for downtime, thousands of people start to worry that something awful has happened to their beloved site.

However, 99.9% of the time there’s nothing to worry about, as the downtime is caused by a misconfiguration, maintenance or a drunk admin.

TorrentFreak reached out to the site’s chief server admin but like the site itself, no response this far.

Earlier rumors that the cave where the servers are located collapsed have not been confirmed.

As always the best solution is to take a deep breath, and wait a few hours. The Pirate Bay will be back eventually.

As always, feel free to post lolcats in the comments below. Haikus are welcome too.

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

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded

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

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.

This confirms our earlier reports this week, and show that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime. It’s been a controversial week and at times emotions were running really high. In the absence of any official announcement it was really hard to separate fact from fiction, with rumor and counter-rumor.

The bad news of course is that Demonoid is now unavailable to Canadians. Unfortunately it is not the fist time an anti-piracy organization effectively shuts down access to a part of the BitTorrent community. Earlier this week Isohunt had to ban US users from its trackers, and last month TorrentSpy blocked access to US users, both by pressure from the MPAA.

At the time we write this article, the forums are still offline, but it probably wont take long before these are back online too. The first sign of Demonoid’s return came yesterday when the trackers started responding again.

When an avalanche of upset Demonoid users came to TorrentFreak this week, the mood was grim when not only their site disappeared but also doubts were cast on our report. We aim to be a credible news source and understand the responsibility we have in the BitTorrent community. While understanding how Demonoid’s Canadian users must be feeling right now, it’s great that we now get the chance to share in the relief of the majority of Demonoid’s dedicated userbase.

The second most popular BitTorrent tracker on planet earth has returned, that’s the most important thing.

Update: Demonoid is having some problems again, this message now appears: “The latest changes to the site are giving us some problems – We’ll be back soon”

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

We contacted both the CRIA and Demonoid’s ISP in an attempt to confirm the story, but they didn’t want to respond to these allegations. Both parties confirmed nor denied their involvement. In addition, we tried to get an official response from Deimos, the founder and the head admin of Demonoid, unfortunately without any result.

The general consensus in the Demonoid IRC channel now is that the downtime is caused by hardware issues, and that the site will probably return within a few days.

Others still think that the Canadian ISP took Demonoid offline after they received legal threats (from the CRIA), but this is just speculation at this point. Demonoid’s ISP said earlier that it would not hesitate to pull the plug on Demonoid if they had to, however, this explanation is less plausible now because the trackers still run on the same IP. This indicates that the servers are still hosted by their Canadian ISP.

It is great to see that the second largest BitTorrent tracker is back in action. Thousands of torrents stopped responding when the tracker went down, frustrating over a million BitTorrent users. I guess it’s time to finish these torrents.

Update: Demonoid Returns, Forced to Block Canadian Traffic By the CRIA

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

However, the current downtime of Demonoid has nothing to do with legal actions, but with hardware issues. The Demonoid team says they are currently replacing harddrives, and that it could take a few days before the site is back up.

The timeline given indicated that this is more than a regular hardware update. The downtime is probably caused by harddrive failure.

The official announcement in the Demonoid IRC channel is:

“Site offline for a few days while harddrives get replaced”

At this point it is still uncertain if any data is permanently lost or how long it will take to get things up and running. According to one of the admins It looks like the most recent data is lost for good. The good news is that there are backups, but these are a few days old.

Luckily the Demonoid trackers are not affected by the downtime. Demonoid is still one of the most used trackers, any downtime of the tracker will make thousands of torrents unusable in clients without DHT and multi-tracker support.

Update:

Demonoid placed this message on the frontpage:

We had a system problem which will force us to restore everything from backup.
The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up everything up, we have to close down.

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