Pirate Torrent Site RARBG Goes Down With Staff Plagued By COVID-19 And Russia-Ukraine War
RARBG, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, has shut down. The website’s founders attributed the development to the COVID outbreak and the Ukraine war.
The torrent tracker used to specialize in pirated movie and TV series releases. RARBG was founded in 2008 as a Bulgarian BitTorrent tracker. The site immediately began to appeal to an international audience, focusing mostly on English-language releases.
The service will be shut down after two “difficult” years, according to a parting note put online by staff.
“Some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all,” it wrote. “Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES.”
The stoppage comes as some experts believe that the internet may be entering a “golden age” of piracy, owing to rising streaming prices and other challenges.
“Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare,” staff wrote. “Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket.”
RARBG has been in operation for 15 years. It had grown to become one of the most popular torrenting sites on the internet, even surpassing more well-known destinations such as The Pirate Bay.
The update may effect more than just RARBG users. Both the films and torrents that were hosted there were mirrored on other sites, thus the closure of RARBG may make it more difficult to get stolen content elsewhere as well.
RARBG was stopped for the first time in 2008 owing to copyright infringement. Google also removed it from its search results in 2017. Many countries have currently prohibited access to the website.
However, with its announcement of its closure, the torrent site became one of the rare instances where a torrent platform has shut down on its own.
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