The Pirate Bay and Demonoid, two of the oldest torrent sites on the web, are facing rough waters. TPB has had some intermittent downtime and remains inaccessible to a large group of users, while Demonoid has become unusable to many due to technical problems.
More than two weeks ago we reported that The Pirate Bay was suffering a long stretch of downtime.
The site came back eventually, went offline again, and later reappeared. While this is normal behavior by now, for a significant group of people the downtime is rather persistent.
Quite a few people are still unable to reach the site through the usual thepiratebay.org domain name. Instead, they get a Cloudflare notice mentioning that TPB is not responding.
While writing this article we tried to access from various locations, with mixed results. On some connections, it works just fine, while it’s unreachable in others. There’s not really a clear pattern.
The Pirate Bay’s moderators have no explanation for what’s going on, and the tech admins haven’t made any statement. As is often the case, it’s probably some kind of technical issue, one that’s not going away easily. The Tor domain and many proxies remain unaffected though.
Meanwhile, Demonoid users are also having a hard time getting the latest torrents.
Last month we reported that Demonoid’s torrents had gone missing. While these came back eventually, new problems were on the horizon. At the moment, torrent detail pages are not accessible to many people and others can’t get past the site’s Captcha.
Demonoid staffer Phaze1G informed TorrentFreak that there are indeed some issues. However, Deimos, the site’s administrator, is still unreachable. While he has logged in sporadically, staffers haven’t heard from him in weeks.
The staffer shared what he knows in the Demonoid forums, but can’t do anything personally.
“We don’t know why Deimos is not on Demonoid, but if I have to guess those are real-life issues and Demonoid at this moment is not a priority. I really hope that he will return in next 1-2 months and keep this place up and running like he did last year,” Phaze1G notes.
“Right now, we can only wait as Demonoid is hosted on 6 continents and if one of the locations have some minor issue, the whole site will face partial issues.”
While these issues are inconvenient for users, both Demonoid and The Pirate Bay have faced rougher waters over the years. As for the users? They must have learned to be patient by now.