Pirate site The Pirate Bay goes down, then sails for Costa Rica

The original home of The Pirate Bay, probably the Web’s highest-profile site for copyrighted movies, music, and software, is no longer online.

However, at least a placeholder is alive on a Costa Rican domain—though not much more than that.

TorrentFreak first noted the outage. The site’s reporters said that they had received a statement from Paul Pintér, Sweden's police national coordinator for IP enforcement, claiming that there had been a raid on a server room owned by The Pirate Bay at a site in Stockholm.

According to earlier reporting from the site, however, The Pirate Bay had moved to a cloud-based infrastucture that used 21 “virtual servers” controlled by a load balancer. The idea, according to The Pirate Bay, was that the distributed architecture would make it “raid-proof,” as the site could simply be moved from domain to domain. Whether that’s the case or not, time will tell.

The Pirate Bay’s Twitter feed has gone dark since Dec. 3. Related sites, such Suprbay.org, are also offline, as are Bayimg.com and Pastebay.net. The mobile version of The Pirate Bay, themobilebay.org, also timed out when PCWorld tried to access it.

:story: PCWorld