The shutdown of KickassTorrents had a pronounced impact on the torrent ecosystem. Not only did one of the largest torrent indexers disappear, the popular torrent storage cache Torcache also vanished overnight. As a result, several sites were left without a good torrent repository, a gap iTorrents.org hopes to fill.

Two weeks ago Polish law enforcement officers arrested Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents.

The arrest resulted in the shutdown of the site, which came as a shock to millions of KAT users and the torrent community at large.

Out of nowhere, the largest torrent index disappeared and there are no signs that it’s coming back anytime soon. The same is true for the torrent hosting platform Torcache.net, which KAT actively used.

While there are no official links between the two sites, it seems likely that Torcache was taken down following KAT’s troubles. This means that it will probably remain offline for the time being.

This has caused trouble for several other torrent sites which also relied on Torcache, such as 1337x.to and Monova.

As is often the case, however, when one service disappears several others are ready to take its place. The situation is no different here, as iTorrents.org is already advertising itself as a Torcache replacement.

Mimicking the same layout, which was first pioneered by Torrage, another defunct service, iTorrents offers a dedicated torrent storage platform.

iTorrents.org



TorrentFreak spoke to the operator of iTorrents.org, who also manages LimeTorrents.cc and TorrentDownloads.me. He says that 1337x.to has come on board already and he invites other torrent sites to join as well.

“Currently 1337x and our own sites are using itorrents.org. I hope more webmasters start using it soon,” he says.

In addition to 1337x, several KAT mirrors have also switched to iTorrents to replace the non-functional Torcache links.

iTorrents was officially launched earlier this year when the operator found out that Torcache was blocked in several countries. He is now planning to upgrade the server, so the service can cope with the increase in traffic.

There are some other smaller torrent caches available as well, such as thetorrent.org, but iTorrents appears to be the leading one for now.

While iTorrents may be able to replace Torcache, the aftermath of the KAT shutdown is still being felt by many of its former users.

For many people, KickassTorrents was a community above all else, and a harddrive full of torrents isn’t going to replace that.