The Pirate Bay has slowly but steadily returned to its former glory. After more than three years, the deviant torrent site has regained a spot among the 100 most-visited sites on the Internet. While many of the site's users may cheer at the news, there's also a dark side to the recent resurgence.

When the The Pirate Bay suffered over a month of downtime late 2014, many of the site’s regular visitors went elsewhere.

This resulted in a significant traffic dip afterwards, but in recent months the notorious torrent site has seen a massive uptick in visitors.

At the beginning of the year TPB was already the largest torrent site. Today, Internet traffic ranking service Alexa lists the site among the 100 most-visited domains in the world once again, in 99th place. That’s the first time in three years.

While external traffic measurements are far from perfect, the graph below shows a steady increase in ranking since last summer. Exactly how many visitors The Pirate Bay has remains unknown, but SimilarWeb estimates it at a quarter billion ‘visits’ per month.

Keep in mind that the estimates above don’t account for the dozens of Pirate Bay proxies that serve users in countries where the site is blocked. That will likely add several millions of monthly visitors, at least.

Whether Pirate Bay’s recent resurgence is something torrent users should be happy about is another question. The recent uptick in traffic is mostly caused by the demise of other torrent sites.

Last summer both KickassTorrents and Torrentz left the scene, and ExtraTorrent followed a few weeks ago. Many of these users have flocked to The Pirate Bay, which is the prime source for user uploaded torrents.

That the Pirate Bay is still around is somewhat of an achievement in itself. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to shut the site down.

It started in 2006, when Swedish authorities raided the site following pressure from the United States, only for the site to come back stronger. The criminal convictions of the site’s founders didn’t kill the site either, nor did any of the subsequent attempts to take it offline.

While many pirates have fallen in love with TPB’s deviant behavior, the recent downfall of other sites means that there’s a lot of pressure and responsibility on the shoulders of the site now. Many other indexers rely on TPB for their content, which is something not everyone realizes.

For now, however, TPB continues its reign.