QuoteThe Pirate Bay suffered some downtime today, welcoming users with a Cloudflare error message, which is nothing new really. But earlier this week the site was hard to reach for a more unusual reason; the Game of Thrones season finale overloaded the torrent site with visitors.
The Pirate Bay was unreachable for several hours today, after it already experienced connectivity issues on Monday and Tuesday.
Today’s downtime was due to a DDoS attack, we were informed, and at the time of writing the site is working fine again.
What’s interesting, though, is that the site’s connectivity issues earlier this week were triggered by something more unusual. A massive increase in “Game of Thrones” traffic.
Yesterday, the TPB-team said traffic to the site quadrupled on Monday after the season finale was uploaded. A 400% increase means millions of extra visitors, something that can easily grind a site down to a halt.
The Pirate Bay is capable of handling some traffic peaks, we were told, but the Game of Thrones surge was hard to manage.
The spike in visitors is not unique to The Pirate Bay website. It affected other torrent sites too, especially after The Pirate Bay became unreachable in some parts of the world.
One torrent site owner found the traffic surge so unprecedented and sudden, that it almost seemed like a DDoS attack.
The problems are not limited to torrent sites alone. Plenty of legal streaming platforms had trouble keeping up with the Game of Thrones demand as well. For example, a lot of HBO Go users complained that they couldn’t access the service when the season finale aired.
Finally, to illustrate how Game of Thrones traffic is dominating torrents sites we only have to look at the most shared files on The Pirate Bay. Currently, top seven are all GoT related.
Now that Game of Thrones has come to an end, for this season at least, things are likely to calm down a bit.
TPB’s most shared torrents
![tpbtopd.png]()
torrentfreak.
