The Pirate Bay’s original and main domain has been unreachable for more than a month.
While the site operates as usual on the Tor network, visitors to ThePirateBay.org are welcomed by a Cloudflare error message mentioning that the “connection timed out.”
Two weeks ago, a source familiar with the matter informed us that the infamous torrent site faces some technical issues and the admin is taking this opportunity to rewrite some code. After that, we received no updates.
Today, however, something appears to be changing. For the first time in years, the whois record for ThePirateBay.org has been updated. Instead of the domain pointing to Cloudflare’s nameservers, it is now linked to the default nameservers of the domain registrar EasyDNS.
In addition, the domain’s status code has changed from ‘client Transfer Prohibited’ to ‘ok,’ which means that there are no restrictions preventing it from being transferred to a new owner.
At the time of writing, all traffic to ThePirateBay.org is resolving to 127.0.0.1, which is the generic localhost IP-address. This means that the domain name is effectively null routed, with all requests dumped into a local black hole.
The new details are gradually propagating. The following query from WhatsMyDNS shows that, in some places, it still resolves to the Cloudflare server.
The changes are highly unusual but without further details, it is hard to say what’s going on here. While it’s pure speculation, we can go over a few options.
The first and most likely option is that The Pirate Bay team intentionally made these changes. They may have moved away from Cloudflare to set up shop elsewhere, pointing the DNS to 127.0.0.1 for the time being.
That would not explain why they changed the status code, however. Nor is it clear why this intermediate step would be needed.
A second option is that Cloudflare may have kicked The Pirate Bay out. That seems unlikely, however, as The Pirate Bay would usually not update its DNS records this quickly. Also, there are no unusual errors in places where the domain name still resolves to Cloudflare.
Another option is that EasyDNS was ordered to take action by a court to null route the domain, and to allow it to be transferred to a third party. The latter would also explain the updated status code. This is not the case though.
EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic informs TorrentFreak that it hasn’t taken any action regarding this domain. As standard procedure, the company did reach out to the registrant to make sure they’re aware of what’s happened and to double-check if everything is ok.
Until there’s an official announcement from the Pirate Bay team, the changes will remain a mystery.
Whatever the reason is, it’s worth keeping an eye on. We will continue to monitor the situation in the days to come and will update this article if more information becomes available.
Update: The Pirate Bay appears to be back online after they switched to new Cloudflare nameservers.
