OpenBitTorrent, PublicBT and Istole.it are three of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.
This means that these non-commercial services handle a staggering three billion connections per day – each.
However, over the past several weeks the three trackers have been offline most of the time. While they have had their fair share of downtime in the past, it’s not often that these top trackers become unresponsive all at once.
OpenBitTorrent was the first to go offline early December. The domain name, registered to Pirate Bay’s Fredrik Neij, disappeared without notice leaving many downloaders in the cold.
Not much later the PublicBT and Istole.it trackers folded too. The latter was hit by the Pirate Bay raid as collateral damage, alongside several other BitTorrent related services.
During the weeks that followed the three trackers have worked hard on a comeback. There have been ups and downs, but now they’re all up and running again.
