For many seasoned BitTorrent users, 1337x.to is a familiar name. The site has been around for fifteen years and is a home to many reputable uploaders.
Over the years 1337x has steadily climbed through the ranks. With millions of daily visits, it is one of the most popular torrent sites, trailing only behind YTS.mx and The Pirate Bay.
At the time of writing, the site is hard to reach though. Most people who try to access the main 1337x.to domain name are greeted by an error message from their browser. This is no surprise, as the domain doesn’t appear to have any DNS records as the moment (for some it may still load due to cached DNS entries).
“This site can’t be reached. Check if there is a typo in 1337x.to,” Chrome reports, while Firefox notes that it has “trouble finding that site.”
It is not clear why this is happening. The issue isn’t related to a hosting or server problem, but it typically shows up when DNS servers can’t resolve the website’s URL to an IP address.
Looking more closely at the matter, we noticed that the 1337x.to domain name expired earlier this week. While there’s typically a grace period that will keep expired domains operational for a while, this could have something to do with the downtime.
Strangely enough, the domain records were updated two days after they expired. However, that clearly didn’t solve the problem.
While the main 1337x.to domain name is currently out of action, several of the torrent site’s official backups are still working as usual. These include 1337x.st, x1337x.ws, x1337x.eu and x1337x.se. That also confirms that the servers are working as expected.
We contacted the operator of 1337x to find out more about the domain troubles but they didn’t immediately reply.
Update: A few hours after we published this article the 1337x.to domain name was renewed. There are DNS records as well now, so the site should start to reappear again shortly, if it hasn’t already.
