The Pirate Bay has been out of action for the best part of a day, after its Netherlands-based ISP was ordered to halt its service to the BitTorrent tracker site.

NForce, which TPB switched to last weekend, responded to a request from Dutch anti-piracy group Brein (statement translated from Dutch to English) yesterday to cut off service to the website.

The latest outage came just a few days after the site went titsup for about three hours last Friday.

It’s understood that lawyers representing big name movie studios have been cracking down on ISPs that provide bandwidth to TPB, by threatening them with legal action.

In August Swedish web service provider Black Internet was ordered by Stockholm’s district court to cut off its bandwidth supply to TPB or face a penalty of 500,000 kronor (£43,000) a day. It complied, but later said it would appeal the decision.

Prior to grabbing its bandwidth from NForce, TPB briefly shifted to a Ukrainian ISP that was also sucker-punched with legal threats.

At time of writing TPB was still out of operation, and it's unclear when the site might come back to life. ®