This article has been just updated: January 18, 2024
With the world under lockdown, businesses closed, and people staying at home due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), online piracy is surging across the globe. Popular torrent trackers have been reporting record numbers of daily users, who use them to download movies, music, video games, and any other content to make the pandemic more bearable.
Growing Demand for Torrenting
It turns out that when a third of the global population is on coronavirus lockdown, the demand for online entertainment skyrockets. Many online streaming services, such as Netflix and YouTube, have voluntarily reduced video quality in certain regions to prevent the internet from collapsing under the strain of record usage.
But it’s not just legal streaming services that report record-breaking numbers. In northern Italy, the current epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Europe, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which is used by many torrent sites for content distribution and DDoS mitigation, has reported a spike in traffic of more than 30 percent compared to earlier this year.
“As people are staying at home, content demand is bound to increase, and as it does, piracy is a continuing issue,” said Kieron Sharp, the CEO of Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), the UK’s leading intellectual property protection organization.
Torrents are especially well-suited for meeting the current demand because of their peer-to-peer nature. In a nutshell, the more people download a torrent, the more available it becomes. Torrent sites themselves can easily handle more visitors because they don’t host any content on their servers. Their job is to simply help users find what they’re looking for and download it directly from other users.
Torrent sites argue that what they’re doing isn’t illegal because they’re essentially just glorified catalogs of links to files stored on other servers and computers. While the legality of torrent sites is debatable, what’s crystal-clear is that the act of downloading and sharing copyrighted content using the BitTorrent protocol is illegal in most countries.
What Happened to The Pirate Bay?
Virtually all torrent sites are attracting thousands of new visitors every day, except for one: The Pirate Bay. For some time now, The Pirate Bay has been down and not working, displaying an “Error 522 Connection timed out” message.
As is always the case when the infamous torrent site represented by a pirate ship with the logo of the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign on its sails becomes inaccessible, rumors have started to spread online about its possible end. Even the moderators on The Pirate Bay forum have no idea what’s going on.
The only reliable information we currently have about The Pirate Bay comes from TorrentFreak, a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on file sharing and online piracy. TorrentFreak contacted The Pirate Bay’s operator, who goes under the name Winston, via a reliable source and found out that torrent site is experiencing technical issues and using the downtime caused by them to rewrite some of its code.
If that’s really the case, it’s likely that The Pirate Bay will be back online in just a few days. The good news is that the site is still accessible at its .onion address using the Tor Browser, a modified version of the Mozilla Firefox configured for the Tor network.
Top 7 Most Popular Torrent Trackers in March 2024
The ongoing pandemic has caused virtually all torrent trackers to surge in popularity, but some more than others. Let’s take a closer look at the top seven most popular torrent trackers in March 2024.
1. Pirate Bay (Alexa Rank: 90)
The Pirate Bay (PirateBay) 100% Working Mirrors & Proxies:
Last Updated: 27 April, 2024, EST
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