Black Internet, the Pirate Bay’s largest bandwidth supplier, just shut down the notorious BitTorrent tracker after a court ordered it to pay a fine of 500,000 kroner ($70,800). Since about 9:30am PT, the site has been inaccessible. Just a few months ago, the Pirate Bay announced that it had been acquired by Global Gaming Factory (GGF). This sale, however, started to fall apart over the last few days. Unless the Pirate Bay can find another ISP, it will remain inaccessible until the outcome of a civil suit against the company can be resolved.
Update (2pm PT): some users report that the site is back up, though we still aren’t able to connect.
This being the Pirate Bay, however, we don’t really expect the site to be down for too long. Chances are that the group will simply relocate to another ISP (the service is already somewhat decentralized) or move its operations to an offshore location. Just a few weeks ago, somebody actually created an archive of the Pirate Bay as a torrent file. With this, a third party could possibly recreate the Pirate Bay.
The sale of the Pirate Bay to GGF, however, will remain uncertain, even if the site comes back online. Currently, Swedish stock market regulators are looking into this deal to determine if GGF actually has enough money to complete the deal or if the announcement was just a scam to boost GGF’s stock price.
