Kickass Torrents is back, after it was shut down in August after its alleged boss was arrested by the US Justice Department in Poland. (Screenshot of new website) Kickass Torrents is back, after it was shut down in August after its alleged boss was arrested by the US Justice Department in Poland. (Screenshot of new website)

Kickass Torrents is back, or at least it is reported to be. According to a TorrentFreak report, Kickass Torrents’ original staffers have brought the defunct website back to life under a new domain name, with all its old content and former glory.

The website appears to be under construction right now with the staffers displaying a message saying, “Servers Load have been affected, there are other few sources of this issue, its not just one. We are working on fix this as soon as possible .. one thing is for sure, we are not going anywhere, even as much these behind this acts want us to. Cowards always choose the shadows to commit their acts, and I do personally hope they know how to pray, they will need it.”

Thanks to a special request from team members, the website has also pinned a YouTube link to Rick Astley’s famous track Never Gonna Give You Up, which goes like ‘never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you’ – we assume this is a message to the community suggesting that Kickass Torrents is here to stay.

Kickass Torrents was shut down after its alleged founder Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and the domain name was seized by the US Justice Department. Even with the main website dead, a lot of clones of the popular torrent website cropped up on the web, but were nothing more than pale shadows of the original Kickass Torrent with not so up to date content.

After the website was shut down, a lot of the KAT-crew in an effort to make a new community launched the katcr.co forum, hinting at a comeback. It appears they have made the move now. Katcr.co has now launched a fully operational website for the pirated content, and resembles the original website.

“We have all our major uploaders on board and they continued to share tirelessly even before the torrent engines returned. The torrent community can continue to expect to see uploads from all the names they know and trust,” the KATcr crew was quoted by TorrentFreak. “The majority of our original Staff, Admins and Moderation team joined us after Kat.cr went down – which is something we’re very proud of. This shows the loyalty, dedication and real love for KAT that we all share,” they added.

They staffers have point out that their site has a proper ‘DMCA takedown procedure’, just like websites like YouTube, saying that they do not store any copyrighted material on their own servers.

We have been unable to open the website ourselves, as reports suggest that it is being clogged by heavy online traffic.

Popular torrent aggregator website Torrentz.eu voluntarily shut shop following the arrest of Artem Vaulin, and bid farewell to all its users. At the time of shutdown the website was ranked 186 in global website ranking as per traffic analysis website Alexa.

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