By taking the Pirate Bay offline last month, a small team of Swedish police officers proved the infamous piracy site was vulnerable to a raid, debunking years of rhetoric from administrators who openly bragged they could never be stopped. The Pirate Bay had claimed it was run through the cloud, but that's now being contradicted by police, who told TorrentFreak that 50 servers were confiscated in the raid.

A Pirate Bay administrator had told the piracy news site in 2012 that the only way to knock the site offline would be to confiscate the technology used to upload torrents to the cloud. “If the police decide to raid us again, there are no servers to take, just a transit router,” said an unnamed administrator. “If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images.”

(The servers were relocated in 2011 to a “mountain cave” outside Malmo, a town in southern Sweden, TorrentFreak reported at the time.)

But police reportedly gained access to the Pirate Bay’s datacenter storage room, where they found and seized old equipment used to keep the site running during previous downtimes.

Still, despite being offline for more than a month, ThePirateBay.se remains the 161st-most-visited website in the world more than a month since it was last updated, according to the Internet ranking site Alexa. But instead of a trove of illegally posted movie and music torrents, the Pirate Bay’s homepage now features only a waving pirate flag and a clock clounting down to Feb. 1, leading to speculation that the site will return on that date.