The Pirate Bay has been hard to reach over the past week. No further details have been announced. The site remains intermittently accessible over the Tor network, but it's clear that the site faces technical difficulties. TPB's moderators are in the dark about the exact cause, so it's unclear how long the problems will last.
The Pirate Bay has been hard to reach for more than a week.
For most people, the site currently displays a Cloudflare error across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that a “bad gateway” is causing problems.
Others see the dreaded “database maintenance” message, with a prompt to check back in 10 minutes. If they do, the exact same notification usually pops up.
As is often the case with TPB, no further details are available to us and there is no known ETA for the site’s full return. However, judging from past experience, it’s likely some type of technical issue that needs fixing.
TorrentFreak reached out to a Pirate Bay staffer who informed us that the downtime is a mystery to most staffers as well. The technical part of the site is managed by “Winston,” who hasn’t yet provided an explanation.
We also contacted another person who managed the site in the distant past, but he had no further information on the present issues either.
The Pirate Bay has had prolonged downtime in the past and always returned thus far. There is no indication that things are different now, but the duration of the current problems certainly is longer and more widespread than usual.
TPB is still occasionally available via its .onion address on the Tor network, which is accessible using the popular Tor Browser, for example. However, as the official status page reveals, the Tor version is also experiencing some issues.
This isn’t the first setback for Pirate Bay visitors this year. As reported previously, new registrations to the site were disabled a few months ago to prevent spam floods. This remains the case today.
The trouble has motivated some Pirate Bay users to move elsewhere for the time being. Some have switched to unofficial proxy sites, which may still be somewhat operational, while others are utilizing other torrent sites.
For the rest, it’s just the usual waiting game. If we look at the past, the site will likely reappear eventually, and then continue as if nothing ever happened.
