Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB's traffic. As a result the site is now down for most people.

Since The Pirate Bay found a new home in Ukraine last week, traffic to the site has been routed through Netherlands-based ISP NForce, which uses the services of Dutch carrier Leaseweb.

In a response to this new setup, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN asked Leaseweb to stop passing on traffic to the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

Although Leaseweb doesn’t allow torrent sites to be hosted on its network, they also said that they are not responsible for traffic they pass on to other parts of the Internet, and as such have no plans to disconnect The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay is hosted on a different autonomous system (AS). LeaseWeb is not the host, and our client [NForce] is not hosting The Pirate Bay either. We are only the IP Transit supplier, or carrier of Internet traffic for a company that uses our carrier services,” Alex de Joode, Security Officer of Leaseweb told ISPam.

BREIN of course disagreed with Leaseweb’s position and demanded that Leaseweb’s client NForce stopped routing traffic to The Pirate Bay. And they succeeded. A few hours ago NForce disconnected The Pirate Bay and at the time of writing the site is inaccessible in most parts of the world, if not all.

“We summoned NForce to stop the routing and they complied,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a response.

This case is a rather unique one that sets a disturbing precedent. In fact, it’s the first time that an ISP that merely routes traffic has decided to disable access to a BitTorrent site. In theory this could make it very easy for BREIN to shut down hundreds of other BitTorrent sites that are routed through Dutch networks, if they can strike enough fear into carriers.

There is no doubt that The Pirate Bay will resurface soon with a slightly altered setup, but if anti-piracy outfits such as BREIN start to go after data carriers it will become increasingly difficult to find alternatives.

Update: The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that the site will be back online with 4 new transits tomorrow. The current downtime is not (only) related to the routing issue, but rather with the new hosting company. Everything should be back to normal soon.