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The Pirate Bay SUNK: It vanishes after Swedish data center raid

Arrr-gh! We don't mean disk RAID – outage after cops nab servers in Stockholm

Torrent search engine and copyright-infringement poster child The Pirate Bay fell offline worldwide on Tuesday – reportedly after cops raided a data center in Stockholm, Sweden.

The site remained unavailable for much of the day, only reemerging in the late hours with a new URL using the top-level domain for Costa Rica.

It's unclear, however, whether the new site is a continuation of the earlier version or an unofficial mirror. As of late Tuesday, it seemed largely unresponsive, and search requests returned server errors.

Swedish authorities have kept mostly mum about the raid that apparently downed the site, including such details as the exact location of the data center involved and what sort of equipment was seized.

Paul Pintér, Stockholm County Police's national coordinator for intellectual property crime, issued only a brief statement on Tuesday, saying: "There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law."

Fredrik Ingbland, a prosecutor who specializes in file-sharing cases on behalf of the Swedish government, also confirmed the raid to Sveriges Radio, although he would not share further details or even confirm that The Pirate Bay was the target.

"Several servers and computers were seized, but I don't want to say exactly how many," Ingbland said, adding, "I can't say exactly what the crime is yet."

This certainly wouldn't be the first time that authorities have attacked The Pirate Bay by going after its servers. Past occasions have sent the site sailing to various domains and hosting providers around the globe, where it briefly found friendly ports under such regimes as Peru, Guayana, and the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten.

The site's personnel have come under legal pressure, as well. Cofounder Peter Sunde was released from jail last month after serving a five-month sentence for facilitating copyright infringement, and two other Pirate Bay cofounders – Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg – are still locked up on various charges.

According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, at least one man may have been detained by police in connection with Tuesday's raid.

Several other sites reportedly also went offline as a result of the raid in addition to The Pirate Bay, including Bayimg.com, EZTV, Istole, Pastebay.new, Suprbay.org, Torrage, and Zoink. ®

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