Torrent Blackout: Mystery as almost a dozen sites go offline amid huge crackdown fear

TORRENT downloaders have been left fearing a major crackdown after almost a dozen websites - including The Pirate Bay - mysteriously went offline.

Torrent users have been left wondering if a secret crackdown is taking place after The Pirate Bay was among almost a dozen sites that went offline.

The Pirate Bay suffered connection issues on Monday and Tuesday as the site received a surge in traffic following the Game of Thrones season 7 finale.

However, a few days later on Thursday the major torrent site went down for a few hours after it experienced a DDoS attack, according to TorrentFreak.

But The Pirate Bay wasn’t alone - this week almost a dozen major torrent sites went offline leaving users asking serious questions.

Major torrent website 1337x is one big player that has experienced issues in recent days, and has said it is currently the target of an "ongoing attack".

Several torrent site admins also told TorrentFreak that they had noticed an increase in suspicious traffic which left their sites reeling.

One of the most widely used torrent search engines - TorrentProject.se - has been down for three days.

When users tried to access the site, they were simply greeting with a ‘403 Forbidden’ error message.

Another popular torrent search engine, Isohunt, has been unresponsive for over a week now.

Major torrent website 1337x gave advice to their users after being subject to an “ongoing attack” this week.

In a statement on their website, 1337x said: “Due to ongoing attack on website we have enabled cloud flare protection that caused auto-upload scripts to stop working.

“If you are uploader and your script is no longer working contact us via contact form.

“Include your server ip so we can whitelist it.”

Fans were also left fearing after WorldWideTorrents became unresponsive for a few days.

However, it later emerged the site had moved to a different domain name.

The large number of major torrent sites going offline has lead many torrent users to question if there is a widespread attack taking place on torrent sites.

In the TorrentFreak comments section, one user theorised that “shady” parties were behind the large scale torrent outage.

While a user allegedly representing a website that unblocks websites banned by ISPs said: “We seen increase in traffic and ddos attacks [sic].”

The news comes as this week HDClub, Russia’s leading HD-only torrent website, permanently shut down.

The torrent site had 170,000 users and was know for high-resolution torrents that often leaked onto The Pirate Bay.

However, its operators said that continual complaints from rightsholders and third-party attacks have lead them to close down the site.

An announcement from the website said: “Recently, we received several dozens of complaints from rightsholders weekly, and our community is subjected to attacks and espionage.

“In parallel, there is a tightening of Internet legislation in Russia, Ukraine and EU countries.

“In the circumstances, we can no longer support the work of the club in the originally conceived format.

“The project is closed, but we ask you to refrain from long farewells. Thank you all and goodbye.”

This year authorities have been clamping down on online piracy, with the penalties for it being increased significantly.

Earlier this year the Digital Economy Act became law, meaning anyone caught sharing illegal files in the UK could be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

Previously, the maximum jail term for copyright infringement was two years but this has now been increased to a maximum of 10.

Although the bill is mainly aimed at stopping those distributing content illegally, end users could also end up in trouble.