The sunken Pirate Bay is undergoing salvage operations and could return to the waters of the internet late next week, if a new countdown timer on the original site is to be believed.



The timer, which is counting down to zero, stands at just over 10 days and 11 hours - but does not state what will happen at the end of the period.

At the bottom of the page a familiar Pirate Bay battleship logo sails towards a cartoon of an island harbour named “welcome home”. That could indicate a return to the internet for the self-proclaimed “galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent site”.

The rest of the temporary website resembles the original Pirate Bay, with an inoperable search bar.

‘Hints and teasers’

Links to the Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser and PromoBay, which shows music videos from YouTube, are live. An animated image showing a billowing pirate flag has replaced the original Pirate Bay logo.

Andy Maxwell, from piracy tracking site TorrentFreak, said: “Via a web server in Moldova, those behind the Pirate Bay have been posting various hints and teasers suggesting that the current downtime will come to an end in roughly 10 days time.”

The Swedish investigation, which instigated the police raid in December that took the site offline, is still ongoing.

Despite attempts by rivals, including competing piracy site IsoHunt, to revive the site, Pirate Bay’s operators claimed they “couldn’t care less” about the raid and site’s shutdown.

The new timer and site imagery suggests that the “30 to 50 people from all over the world” who run the Pirate Bay have decided to attempt to resurrect the site, although in what form is unclear.

• The Pirate Bay crew ‘couldn’t care less’ about being taken offline