Bayfiles, the file-hosting service created by two former operators of The Pirate Bay, has disappeared from the Internet, leaving tens of thousands of users in the dark. The site went offline shortly after the arrest of Pirate Bay's Fredrik Neij who is currently serving his prison sentence in Sweden.

Three years ago Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde launched Bayfiles, a new file-sharing venture based on the cyberlocker model.

With steady growth ever since the site accumulated a decent user base, not least since it’s still prominently linked from Pirate Bay’s homepage.

Aside from issues with Google and its payment processor the site never ran into trouble. However, starting a few weeks ago Bayfiles suddenly disappeared from the Internet.

The site, which is registered to Pirate Bay’s former operator Fredrik Neij, went down around the same time that he was arrested.

Based on traffic estimates Bayfiles had tens of thousands of users per day. The site was frequently used by third-party sites that linked to pirated video hosted on the site. How many users have personal files stored on the site is unknown.

The graph below shows that Bayfiles’ traffic tanked early November and at the time of writing the site remains inaccessible.

Bayfiles going down



TF spoke with the recently released Peter Sunde who told us that Fredrik’s arrest may indeed be related to the downtime. Peter himself hasn’t been involved in the project since its launch, as he was locked out by his former Pirate Bay colleague.

“I started Bayfiles and invited Fredrik and a third person to join in. Then all of a sudden, just before the launch, I no longer had access to the system and other systems that we previously co-operated in making. I also lost access to a few sites that Fredrik was hosting for me,” Sunde tells us.

The incident was the end of the friendship between the two. Peter tells us that Fredrik suddenly stopped responding, and the two never spoke again.

“Since that day Fredrik has never replied to any of my calls, texts, emails, chat requests or anything. I actually feels it’s kind of karma that he’s in prison, just a shame that he’s in prison for the wrong thing,” he says.

If Fredrik is indeed the current operator then it will be a few months before the site comes back. The former Pirate Bay operator was taken to a Swedish prison two weeks ago where he now has to serve his one year prison sentence.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, remains up and running, as do other TPB affiliated properties such as BayImg, PasteBay and PirateBrowser.