Demonoid, a popular BitTorrent tracker currently hosted in Ukraine, is offline after reportedly being audited and shut down by local law enforcement. Kommersant reports that an anti-cybercrime police division investigated ColoCall — the company that provided hosting space for Demonoid — and copied all information from the servers before sealing them. An anonymous ColoCall manager says that the equipment was not seized, but that it is not operational and that ColoCall was required to end its agreement with Demonoid. The invitation-only tracker had been unavailable for much of the week before the shutdown due to a denial of service attack.

Demonoid has changed location several times, and it's gone offline before due to legal trouble and hardware problems. This shutdown, however, may have had an additional political purpose. According to one source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the investigation was timed to coincide with Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky's visit to the United States, after he released a statement with the US Trade Representative agreeing to "redouble" intellectual property enforcement. While the ColoCall source says Demonoid has backup servers elsewhere, nothing has been restored at this point.