Pirate Bay Registrations are Closed Due to Spam Flood
The Pirate Bay is temporarily closed to new users to prevent the site from being flooded with spam. The site was being abused by scammers who uploaded hundreds of malware-linked torrents at once, a crew member informs TorrentFreak. When a solution is ready, registrations are expected to open up again.
It’s been relatively smooth sailing for The Pirate Bay in recent months.
After a tough 2018 with several days of downtime, the popular torrent site hasn’t had any major outages in a while.
However, for prospective users who want to upload new torrents, all is not well. For more than two weeks now, The Pirate Bay has closed the site to new users.
People who try to register an account are out of luck. While the registration page is still up, it persistently returns the following error message: “Wrong code x. The username and/or e-mail address is already in use.“
While this may appear to be some kind of coding mistake, it is in fact intentional. TPB admin ‘Winston’ closed registrations following a request from the crew, staff member Spud17 informs TorrentFreak.
“Registrations are closed at the request of one of the crew members, as TPB was being battered by floods of malware torrents,” Spud17 says.
“We’ve asked Winston to make it so that new uploaders cannot upload 1000 fakes in 2 seconds.”
Closing registrations does indeed fix this, but it’s a pretty drastic measure. The crew hopes that a more permanent spam control feature will be introduced and that registrations will then open up again.
At the time of writing the crew doesn’t know when this issue will be dealt with. It could be a matter of days, but a few more weeks is also possible. Patience is the only advice they can give.
The people who already had an account can still upload torrents, of course, so most regular users won’t even notice that there’s an issue. If they do, it’s probably because there is less spam than usual.