Over the past few weeks, many people have been under the impression that The Pirate Bay is down. It's not. Instead, the site is simply inaccessible on some networks around the world. The Pirate Bay is aware of the issue. It's not related to ISP blocking or domain name trouble, but the true source of the problem remains a mystery.

The Pirate Bay has suffered quite a bit of downtime over the past several years, but in recent weeks a more alarming pattern has begun to emerge.

While many people can assess the site just fine, at the time of writing there are also millions of visitors who see a Cloudflare error instead of the iconic pirate ship logo.

Luckily for them, there is no shortage of workarounds. Accessing TPB through proxies, its Tor domain, or the site VPN server still works. But, if a problem like this has lasted for weeks, there’s clearly something wrong.

According to various traffic tracking websites, direct visits to The Pirate Bay are down significantly, with Similarweb estimating a drop of more than 32 percent last month alone.

The Pirate Bay is aware of the issues but it doesn’t have a definite answer either.

This means that, like many others, we can only speculate. From our experience with various outages, there are a few options that can be easily ruled out.

For one, this is not the result of a consumer ISP blocking access. The problems are worldwide, occurring in the US, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. There is no clear location-based pattern.

The site’s domain name is working just fine too and the same is true for its DNS. The correct address is being resolved, even from locations where the site is inaccessible.

Many people have been pointing out Cloudflare as the culprit, suggesting the company is willingly blocking TPB. This doesn’t seem likely either. Why would Cloudflare block a site in a few places scattered around the world, and make it appear as if they can’t connect to it?

Since The Pirate Bay itself has no idea what’s happening, the problem doesn’t seem to be on their end either. So what’s going on then?

One option that’s left is that an Internet backbone network is somehow causing trouble. These are the providers which make sure that traffic is routed from your ISP connection, through their infrastructure, to The Pirate Bay.

If one of these networks is not passing on traffic to The Pirate Bay, Cloudflare can’t connect to it, at least not everywhere. This could also explain why the site is unreachable in some locations while working just fine in others.

Something similar happened last year when backbone provider Cogent blocked The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites. In that case, Cogent actually blocked Cloudflare’s IP-addresses.

It’s a possible explanation but, in this case, we haven’t been able to trace the issues to a specific backbone network. This means that, for now, the mystery remains.

A common problem

