During the past weekend many people have been unable to access The Pirate Bay and, at the time of writing, the site’s main domain remains inaccessible.
For most people, the site currently displays a Cloudflare error message across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that the “connection timed out.”
This error suggests that there’s a problem on TPB’s end which is preventing the CDN provider from connecting to the site’s server.
No further details are available to us and there is no known ETA for the site’s full return. Judging from past experience, however, it’s likely a technical issue that has to be addressed. There are no known issues with Cloudflare or the domain name itself.
TorrentFreak hasn’t heard anything from the TPB team but these type of outages are not unusual. The Pirate Bay has suffered many of these outages in the past and the popular torrent site usually returns after a few hours, or days.
While the notorious torrent site remains inaccessible through the regular route, many proxy sites are still online. TPB is also still available via its new .onion address on the Tor network, accessible using the popular Tor Browser, for example.
Both the Tor domain and the proxies still feature fresh content. This means that user uploads and the upload bots are still operational as well.
In the past, the official Pirate Bay forums could point people to the latest status of the site. However, it appears that this feature is also suffering some technical issues as it reports everything to be down.
As always, the best remedy for hardcore Pirate Bay users is patience. But that should be a given by now.
