The Pirate Bay (TPB), ExtraTorrent and YTS.ag Now Listed as Top Free Download Alternatives; Torrenting Still Hurting from KickassTorrents, Torrentz Shut Down (Photo : Facebook)
The Pirate Bay appears to be the last man standing among the key file-sharing sites as similar services are going offline lately. Following the YTS, also known as YIFY, disappearance a few days ago, Popcorn Time, widely regarded as the Netflix for Pirate, reportedly shut down for good. But TPB remains up and running, which seems to prove its incredible resiliency.
Movie torrent site YTS, originally launched as YIFY, went off the air following the upload of its latest movie titles on October 20. The site simply went silent for a few days until a Redditor claiming to be a YTS team member announced on a Reddit thread that its service was the subject of denial of service attack or DoS.
"We got Dosed ... We are working on it at YTS ... We will be back up in a few days maybe even a week," the YTS representative said, known to Reddit as easiertordot2. Yet five days since the outage, there is no clear sign that the issue has been resolved or YTS will be back online soon.
At around the same time that YTS went down, Popcorn Time and its social media accounts mysteriously. It was assumed initially that Popcorn Time's issue is related to that of YTS as the former mostly taps into the YIFY movie collection for its free movie streaming service. The expectation was as soon as YTS reappears, so Popcorn Time is.
However, the problem Popcorn Time is dealing with proved deeper than technical issues. As suggested by Torrent Freak, it's more likely that the Netflix for Pirate is being wracked by internal strife. True enough, the news blog said in a follow up report that Popcorn Time is no more and the chance is slim of the service returning.
"I shutdown all the servers, there is nothing I can do anymore. I deleted any logs that can be harmful for any other dev," Torrent Freak reported a Popcorn Time developer named Wally as saying in a statement.
Another popular site with similar function, Kickass Torrents, would have been the viable alternative but accessing the site is proving unsafe. Per the International Business Times, "the site ... is overrun with malicious advertising that may redirect users to phishing links, or even ransomware.
As a result, Kickass Torrents earns a red flag from Google with the search engine explicitly discouraging users from accessing the site.
So The Pirate Bay is proving to be the last man standing, enduring outages in the past days and weeks and managing to quickly resume its service with seemingly endless stream of tricks to deflect attacks. By default, TPB now plays the alternate to YTS as the latter mirror its movie library to The Pirate Bay server.
