The Pirate Bay is under fire from an unknown attacker in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) strike that has lasted at least 24 hours.

The Pirate Bay is under fire from an unknown attacker in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) strike that has lasted at least 24 hours.

In an early morning post to its Facebook page, The Pirate Bay announced that it was "under a quite big ddos attack."

"We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions," the post continued. "Once we've awaken our tech guru Winston Q we'll get on the issue." By 12:20pm, the site said it was "getting back up [and] stronger than ever," and pointed user to its list of proxies.

As of 2pm Eastern time, access to the site was still spotty.

The attack comes after ISPs in and were ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay over copyright violations. In retaliation, the hacking group Anonymous struck out at Virgin Media, one of the U.K. ISPs ordered to block to the site, prompting The Pirate Bay to .

In a blog post, the team responsible for the Virgin Media attack - AnonAteam - wrote that it had "no involvement" in the DDoS attack on The Pirate Bay.

"It is not a legitimate protest for anyone to be involved with nor does it fall within our objectives," AnonAteam said. "Anyone involved in the attack should stop. It is our understanding Anonymous have no involvement in this attack."

Later in the day, The Pirate Bay said "we KNOW that it is NOT Anonymous who is behind the ddos attack."

As noted by TorrentFreak, "Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, [but] it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent."

In related news, TorrentFreak this week also reported on a Microsoft-backed torrent blocker known as the Pirate Pay. Created in 2009 by brothers Andrei and Alexei Klimenko and their friend Dmitry Shuvaev, the effort received $100,000 from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund, according to Russia Beyond the Headlines.

In a translated blog post, Microsoft's Alexander Krakovetskiy praised Pirate Pay as a proactive way to combat piracy.