Sixteen days after US authorities announced the arrest of Kickass Torrents' admin in Poland, Torrentz.eu, the Internet's biggest BitTorrent meta-search engine, has shut down, according to messages displayed on its home page.

At the time of writing, the Torrentz.eu Web page where users flocked to search for torrent download links is displaying a message that reads, "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines."

Trying to run a search or clicking any link on the site changes that message to "Torrentz will always love you. Farewell."

All backup domains are down as well

All Torrentz domains feature the same page. This includes the main .EU domain and its backups .ME, .CH, and .IN. The site's HTTPS version features the same messages.

Before its abrupt shutdown, Torrentz.eu had managed to reach a respectable #186 Alexa rank.

The site was launched in July 2003 by an individual named Flippy, and its purpose was to index torrents from several large portals and aggregate all the different trackers. This allowed users to download torrent files with multiple trackers in their source, speeding up downloads and preventing dead links in case servers went down.

The mystery surrounding Torrentz.eu's shutdown

With legal pressure increasing on The Pirate Bay and following the Kickass Torrents arrests, other piracy portals have decided to shut down on their own, and among them is Solarmovie too.

As it stands now, it looks like Torrentz.eu admins decided to pull the plug on their own and avoid any future legal problems.

When YTS (YIFY) shut down last year, the MPAA later revealed that it had reached an out-of-court settlement with the YTS admin, who then decided to stop any movie pirating operations.

Additionally, we must not rule out any security breaches. Piracy portals aren't famous for their well-defended walls. Let's just remember the hostile takeover of the EZTV TV torrenting group.