NEW YORK (CNNMoney) - Popular torrent hub The Pirate Bay Suffered an extended outage on Monday and Tuesday, coinciding with a government raid on its former web hosting service. The site says it's down Mainly because of a power outage, however, and that it will be back later this week.
Users of the infamous digital piracy site The Pirate Bay's Facebook page began flooding early on Monday, complaining that the Sweden-based site was not working. The Pirate Bay fans often spook prolonged outages, since the site is firmly in the government crosshairs around the world.
It's the most famous nexus of illegal downloads, and the embodiment of what the anti-infringement like SOPA Legislation aims to kill. On a typical day, several million users swap files through the site's links. When Pirate Bay goes down, a significant chunk of the Internet's infrastructure piracy goes down with it.
Swedish law enforcement agents on Monday raided PRQ, a web host, started by two Pirate Bay co-founders, According to reports in the TorrentFreak and other news outlets. The raid PRQ and many of the sites it hosts knocked offline, fueling speculation that The Pirate Bay was a target of the Crackdown.
PRQ's clients include a number of controversial WikiLeaks and blogs. The Pirate Bay's operators claim that they are minimally affected by the PRQ outage, though.
"We have a relay there but not that much more," the Pirate Bay's operators wrote on their Facebook page. "This combined with a power failure at another place is the reason why we're down at the moment."
The Pirate Bay page said Monday that the site would soon "be back with full force, hopefully later today," but on Tuesday, that the target was pushed back.
"Looks like we will not be up until tomorrow," The Pirate Bay posted on Facebook around 2:30 pm ET on Tuesday.
The Pirate Bay has much stronger forces than survived power outages during its nine-year existence.
Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån The Pirate Bay started in late 2003, taking advantage of the country's lax copyright laws. By October 2004, a handful of individuals were running the site independently.
Operated by an organization registered in the Seychelles, The Pirate Bay bills itself as the "World's Largest BitTorrent tracker of files."
BitTorrent is a free, peer-to-peer software program that lets users swap and download large media files. The tool has many legitimate uses, but it's also heavily used to illegally trade movies and other copyrighted content. The Pirate Bay is simply Operates a torrent tracking network, linking users who connect together to make their trades directly.
No copyright-protected files, ever sit on the site's own servers. That makes it very hard to kill.
The site has been targeted by Governments around the world, and U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, who co-chairs the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, once denounced it on the Senate floor. Last December, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative highlighted The Pirate Bay on its list of "notorious markets for piracy."The site has weathered before police raids, Including one in 2006 that the site is closed down for three days after its servers were confiscated. To evade the shutdown, it has changed web hosts and domain names occasionally.
In 2007, Swedish officials charged three Pirate Bay operators and one of its Financiers with "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws." The trial took two years and ended with the conviction of operators Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström Gottfrid Svartholm as well as a businessman.
The four were sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of $ 905,000 each. All except Svartholm, who was ill and skipped his scheduled court appearances, appealed the sentence, and in 2010 it was amended to include less jail time but a higher fine.
Svartholm disappeared for several years, but last month, he was Arrested in Cambodia in 2010 in connection with the alleged hacking of a Swedish IT company. He was deported back to Sweden, where he is now in detention awaiting formal charges.
