The Pirate Bay's recent downtime issues were caused by malicious actors who DDoSed the site with harmful search queries, a reputable source says. The problem has been addressed by updating the Sphinx search server software and it indeed appears that the site is coming back, albeit not everywhere yet.

Over the past several weeks, The Pirate Bay has suffered prolonged downtime. For many people, the popular torrent site was completely unreachable.

The reason for the persistent issues has not been revealed directly by the site’s operators. Users and staffers, including the moderators, had no idea what was wrong.

This lack of communication is nothing new. Usually, the site returns to normal after a while, to continue as if nothing ever happened. And indeed, starting a few hours ago some people were able to access the site again.

TorrentFreak spoke to someone who directly communicated with the operators. According to this reputable source, the recent Pirate Bay problems were likely caused by malicious actors who DDoSed the site’s search engine with specially crafted search queries.

This person, or persons, overwhelmed The Pirate Bay with searches that break the Sphinx search daemon, effectively crashing the site. Sphinx is an open-source search server and The Pirate Bay reportedly used an older version of the software.

Data corruption…

Due to the high volume of malicious search queries, it wasn’t possible to log the errors and send a bug report, which complicated matters. However, our contact informed us that the Pirate Bay updated Sphinx to a newer version yesterday, which resolved the crashes.

TorrentFreak was unable to independently confirm the above, but our source is generally well informed.

When we tried accessing The Pirate Bay this morning, it was still returning a Cloudflare 522 error in some regions. However, elsewhere the site was coming through fine with plenty of new uploads being listed. It’s unclear why it doesn’t work everywhere, but the site appears to be recovering.

The question that remains is who targeted The Pirate Bay with these harmful search queries and why?

We didn’t speak to The Pirate Bay’s operators directly, but our source believes that this isn’t the work of anti-piracy outfits. Instead, he suspects that a malicious proxy site (or sites) is likely to blame.

Taking The Pirate Bay out drives more traffic to proxy sites. And by holding off the attacks for a while every now and then, there would be enough time for new scripted uploads to be added to the site, so the proxy site could still scrape fresh content.

For now, this remains speculation, but all the signs suggest that someone was purposefully targeting The Pirate Bay.