Infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay was taken offline on Tuesday after a raid by Swedish police. Officers investigating the decade-old file-sharing portal's alleged copyright infringements targeted a server room in Stockholm, seizing "several servers and computers," according to veteran file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad. A copy of the original site's homepage was discovered hours later hosted at a Costa Rican URL, but because the new mirrored Pirate Bay relies on the original site for data, searching or browsing for torrents is impossible.

There was "a crackdown on a server room"

Paul Pintér, national coordinator for IP enforcement for the Swedish police, said that the operation was "a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm" that was "in connection with violations of copyright law." Ingblad told Radio Sweden the raid took place on Tuesday morning, and that "a number of digital forensics experts" were on site alongside police officers. Ingblad did not say whether any arrests had been made at the time, but TorrentFreak reports that police may have detained one man in connection with the operation.

TorrentFreak says The Pirate Bay might not be the only casualty of this most recent crackdown on the sharing of copyrighted material. The torrent portal's forum, Suprbay, and a number of other torrent-related sites have also gone down, including EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage.

It's not clear if arrests were made during the operation

The Pirate Bay has already been largely separated from its original creators. Fredrik Neij, one of the founders of the site, was arrested last month at the border between Laos and Thailand. Neij was convicted by Swedish courts for sharing copyrighted material more than five years ago, but fled the country. Earlier this year, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde was arrested in his home country for his role in running the site, and in November, Gottfrid Svartholm was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for hacking an American company in 2012.

Increasingly, regulations have been put in place to combat the infamous Pirate Bay. UK and Dutch courts have attempted to block access to the site, and last week a French court told ISPs to ban access to the portal; days later, Google removed a group of third-party apps designed to allow access to the torrent portal from the Google Play store.

It's hard to tell what this means for the future of The Pirate Bay. With its founders convicted and under assault from governments and huge corporations, the site faces huge pressure, but it's shown itself to be incredibly resilient. Because the site operates on virtual servers, it's hard to kill: according to Reddit users commenting on the raid, Swedish police only got access to the site's front end load balancer. When other balancers are activated, the site could continue to spring back to life, yet again frustrating attempts to stamp out The Pirate Bay for good.

Update December 10th, 6:00AM: A mirror of The Pirate Bay's homepage has appeared at a Costa Rica-hosted address, but torrents are still unavailable.