ExtraTorrent, one of the world's largest torrent indexes, has lost control over several of its key mirror domain names. The site's operator says that he's been locked out of his domain registrar's control panel following an outside complaint. The site now recommends extra.to and extratorrent.site as the new official mirrors.
With millions of daily visitors ExtraTorrent is the second largest torrent site, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay.
The site’s popularity puts it in the crosshairs of various entertainment industry groups, who put pressure on hosting companies and domain name services to take action.
As a result, over the past several days ExtraTorrent lost control of three domain names used for its official mirror sites. Following a complaint from rightholders, extratorrent.rocks, etproxy.top and extratorrent.date are no longer available.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, the site’s operator points out Subreg.cz as the culprit. The Czech domain registrar allegedly locked the torrent site out of its control panel while the domains stopped resolving.
The registrar reportedly said that there’s nothing it could do to resolve the situation and recommended the torrent site to take the matter to court.
“We don’t have access to the three domain names anymore. Subreg recommended us to go to court to resolve this issue, and ignored our requests,” ExtraTorrent’s SaM says.
While this sounds like a typical registrar domain suspension, something more might be going on. Strangely, the registrar informed TorrentFreak that they are not responsible for the domain issues.
“These domain names are not blocked from our side. We got a complaint which we sent to the account holder,” a Subreg spokesperson says, noting that they operated in compliance with ICANN rules.
This comment suggests that some entity higher up the chain took action. However, the domain WHOIS information doesn’t show any typical registry or registrar suspension notices. The domains have simply been stripped of their “a records,” which means that they’re not responding.
We have asked the registrar for additional information about the discrepancy, but we were told that they only disclose information to the domain owner.
While ExtraTorrent lost three key mirror domains, the main ExtraTorrent.cc domain is still working as it’s registered elsewhere. The same is true for several other official mirror domains.
ExtraTorrent has started pointing all their mirrors to extratorrent.site and extra.to, which are now the official backups. The site’s operator recommends the latter as it’s not blocked anywhere, yet.