Demonoid is without doubt one of the most famous BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Unfortunately, it is also the tracker with the worst record when it comes to uptime as every so often the site disappears for months. With the current downtime of more than a day, users are already fearing the worst.

Demonoid is one of the biggest torrent sites around. Now safely hosted to the west of Russia in Ukraine, the site has previously received unwanted attention from several anti-piracy outfits. So, when the site goes offline a lot of people start to think of the worst, especially if there is little or no warning.

Yesterday, Demonoid once again disappeared leaving its users behind with lots of questions and in a mild state of panic. As is often the case, Demonoid’s admins have remained silent and rumors of a hostile intervention have quickly grown. Thus far, however, there is no reason to assume that the downtime is caused by ‘legal’ reasons. It has to be assumed that the site is facing hardware or network problems.

On the positive side, we can report that Demonoid’s trackers appear to be working just fine. This is no guarantee that the site itself will make a quick return though. Last September the site vanished into thin air and although the tracker returned early November, it took until Christmas before the site was fully operational again.

Last year’s downtime was not unique either. Since 2007 the site has been offline for more than 13 months in total, due to all kinds of problems including issues with the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. Hardware issues and trouble finding a reliable hosting outfit were some of the other explanations that were given in the past.

In a rare interview with Demonoid’s current hosting provider a few months ago we found out that DDoS-attacks and legal issues are unlikely to take the site offline, so we can only guess what the real reason for the ccurrent outage is. The wait has started, once again.

Update: Demonoid is responding (very slow) to some people, and the reason for the downtime seems to be a DDoS attack after all.