Tuesday 18 May 2010

Pirate Bay Sunk Again

The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The team is currently working on a solution.

It seems several major Hollywood movie studios have obtained a preliminary injunction against CyberBunker operator CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG from the Regional Court of Hamburg. The injunction , which was granted without an oral hearing, stated that CB3ROB and Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis were now prohibited from connecting The Pirate Bay website and its servers to the Internet.

yesterday Kamphuis officially confirmed receiving the injunction and has decided to stop routing The Pirate Bay’s traffic until his lawyers have carefully read and reviewed the legal documents. This decision has resulted in downtime for the world’s largest BitTorrent site.

A Pirate Bay insider told a well known torrent site that they are not planning to wait for a decision from the Cyberbunker team, and that they’ve already set the backup process in motion which will bring the site back online. The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing (IP-tunnel) to go through another provider.

It may take several hours before this process has been completed and before all ISPs see the new AS-path. rumors around the internet state things will return to normal as soon as possible, probably within hours.

Ever since The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided back in 2006, the operators of the site have taken extreme measures to ensure that there are proper backup mechanisms in place and that the locations of the servers are well concealed. Where the servers are actually located remains a mystery.