File sharing site The Pirate Bay online again after two months
02 Feb 2015
After a nearly two-month down-time, the world's most notorious file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, has gone online again since Saturday.
The site was shut down by Swedish authorities on 9 December 2014 during a raid on its servers on the outskirts of Stockholm (See: File sharing site The Pirate Bay collapses after police crackdown in Sweden).
The site allows users to search for torrent files to access content such as movies and music through peer-to-peer platform BitTorrent.
Following the longest absence in its 11-year history, thepiratebay.se is now operational and features the image of a phoenix, just as it had following a three-day outage after a raid back in 2006.
Fresh torrents, which included those pointing to newly released content, were reported to be in the process of uploading.
A number of links, including the Contact Us page, were not functioning, even as a page bearing the message "Database maintenance, please check back in 10 minutes" appeared intermittently during searches.
Even as Pirate Bay fans cheered its return on social media, the rift in the community behind the site had deepened, as according to one source, Torrent Freak core "staff" were shut out of the resurrected site, which no longer provided access for moderators.
Meanwhile, CNET reported that the site had proven to be a rather tenacious operation, surviving numerous legal issues that had threatened its existence.
The site's operators were found to be guilty of violating copyright laws in 2009, by a Swedish court.
Later that year, a Swedish Internet cafe company acquired the site for $7.8 million.
Following the most recent shut down, "Pirate Bay" clones cropped up to take the old site's place, and according to TorrentFreak, it would be interesting to see whether or not The Pirate Bay would once again become the centre of the torrenting universe.
