The Pirate Bay has risen from its digital ashes once again. TPB is back online today, more than seven weeks after its servers were raided . The notorious torrent site is operating from the familiar .se domain and it appears that data loss is minimal.

Early December The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

After being down for two weeks the domain came back online waving a pirate flag on its temporary homepage.

TPB later added a countdown to February 1st, alongside several hints that the site would reappear that day.

Today we can report that The Pirate Bay has lived up to the comeback expectations, with a comeback one day ahead of schedule.

A few minutes ago the site started serving torrents to the masses again, much to the delight of millions of users. The Pirate Bay’s homepage currently features a Phoenix.

The Pirate Bay doesn’t have any ads at the moment but the look and feel of the site is familiar, and the user accounts are working properly too. The “Contact Us,” “RSS” and “Register” links are not operational yet and result in a 404 error.

Based on the recent torrents it appears that data loss is minimal. The latest upload was on December 9 last year, the same day TPB’s servers were raided.

There is one quite significant change though. The Pirate Bay staff can no longer access the moderation panel.

Earlier this week TPB staff already told us that they would be locked out of the reborn site. This kind of streamlining would make the site easier to manage and reduce the risk of being brought down for a third time.

However, these planned “optimizations” caused mutiny among the site’s original staff members.

WTC-SWE, one of the lead admins of The Pirate Bay, told us that they are launching their own version of the Pirate Bay, which they believe will be the real one.

These “former” staff members will also relaunch the official Suprbay forums. Interestingly, Thepiratebay.se is no longer listing Suprbay in its links section.

To make the matter even more confusing, Pirate Bay’s downtime spurred the development of various spin-offs, all of which have steady userbases of their own. Isohunt.to’s OldPirateBay.org is currently the largest, with millions of visitors per day and the number one spot for the search term Pirate Bay in Google.

It will be interesting to see if thepiratebay.se can reclaim these visitors during the months to come.

Update: A former TPB staffer informed TF that the moderation interface is indeed gone.

Update: TPB has some connection issues every now and then, probably because of the huge amount of traffic.