Internet backbone providers are an important part of the Internet ecosystem. These commercial Internet services have datacenters all over the world and help traffic of millions of people to flow from A to B.
When the average Internet user types in a domain name, a request is sent through a series of networks before it finally reaches the server of the website.
This also applies to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites such as Primewire, Movie4k, TorrentProject and TorrentButler. However, for more than a week now the US-based backbone provider Cogent has stopped passing on traffic to these sites.
The sites in question all use CloudFlare, which assigned them the public IP-addresses 104.31.18.30 and 104.31.19.30. While this can be reached just fine by most people, users attempting to pass requests through Cogent’s network are unable to access them.
The issue is not limited to a single ISP and affects a small portion of users all over the world, the United States and Europe included. According to Cogent’s own backbone routing check, it applies to the company’s entire global network.
Since routing problems can sometimes occur by mistake, TorrentFreak reached out to Cogent to ask if the block is intentional and if so, what purpose it serves.
A Cogent spokesperson informed us that they looked into the issue but that the company “does not discuss such decisions with third parties,” while adding that they do not control the DNS records of these sites.
That the IP-addresses of The Pirate Bay and the other sites remains inaccessible suggests that it is indeed intentional. This is also backed up by the fact that the addresses in question have a “BGP community string” tag that prohibits it from being sent to other networks.
For now, however, we can only speculate what the reason or target is. Since so many of the sites involved are accused of facilitating copyright infringement, it seems reasonable to view that as a possible cause. However, this remains unconfirmed for now.
The Pirate Bay team is aware of the issue and tells us that users affected by the roadblock should contact Cogent with their complaints, hoping that will change things.
In the meantime, people who want to access the blocked sites have no other option than to come up with a workaround of their own. According to various users the ‘roadblock’ can be bypassed with a VPN or Tor, and some proxy sites appear to work fine too.
The websites themselves can still update their DNS records and switch to a new IP-address, which some appear to have done, but if they are the target then it’s likely that their new IP-address will be blocked soon after.
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The following sites are affected by the Cogent blackhole, but there may be more.
The Pirate Bay, Primewire, Movie4k, Torrentproject, Couch-tuner, Cyro.se, Watchseriesfree, Megashare, Hdmovieswatch, Torrentbutler.eu, Afdah. Movie.to, Mp3monkey, Rnbxclusive.me, Torrentcd, Moviesub, Iptorrents, Putlocker.com and Torrentz.cd.
