The Pirate Bay has dropped the www prefix for all of its domains. The changes occurred earlier this week and were made without a redirect, which is causing some visitors to believe that the site is currently offline.

The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of legal problems and technical difficulties over the years.

Just last month a Swedish court ordered the seizure of site’s main .se domain name. This case is currently on appeal but in the meantime TPB is rotating several new domains.

A few days ago, however, reports started rolling in that the notorious torrent site is no longer accessible to some, across all domains.

Instead of the usual homepage visitors see an error message in their browser, suggesting that the DNS lookup failed.

Luckily enough, the problems are only affecting URLs with a www prefix. For some reason, the corresponding DNS entries have been removed rendering all www links inaccessible.

While it’s quite common for websites not to use the www prefix (we don’t), there’s usually a redirect setup so visitors are directed to the correct URL.

Since TPB doesn’t have a redirect set up, many people are inaccurately assuming that the site is suffering downtime.

For now it remains a mystery why the DNS entries were updated. TF spoke with a moderator of the site, who told us that he and his team were not informed about the changes.

The dropped www prefix is not the only issue The Pirate Bay has been facing recently. Over the past weeks several parts of the site broke temporarily, including user registrations and torrent uploads.

To inform users about these and other technical difficulties, the TPB crew has a status page showing which services are up and running. This page is maintained by the moderators and separately hosted at the Suprbay forum.

As shown below, all crucial features are fully operational at the time of writing. That is, if users have dropped the www prefix from their bookmarks.

Update: strangely enough www.thepiratebay.se started resolving again, without a redirect. The other domains are still www-less.

TPB status

