The Pirate Bay has been down for about the past 24 hours, and says it has been hit by a "quite big" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The controversial website for torrent downloaders confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying "We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions."

Just last week, the Pirate Bay criticized the Anonymous hacking group for running a DDoS campaign against Virgin Media. "We do NOT encourage these actions," the Pirate Bay said, also on its Facebook page. "We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship."

The Pirate Bay, of course, is also under a very different kind of attack from copyright holders, who won a UK ruling last month ordering Internet service providers to block access to the site. But where legal means couldn't shut the Pirate Bay down worldwide, a DDoS attack has succeeded, at least temporarily.

TorrentFreak says the Pirate Bay has been "inaccessible to most of the world for nearly 24 hours," but notes that users can try to access the site through proxies. The Pirate Bay itself warned against users taking matters into their own hands, though, saying yesterday "Use proxies at own risk. Don't login unless you trust the proxy supplier. Don't freak out. You'll get your TPB fix tomorrow."

As of this writing, we're unable to access the Pirate Bay site, with Chrome telling us it is "unable to load the webpage because the server sent no data."