The Pirate Bay lost all of its active "Hydra" domain names this morning. ThePirateBay.LA, .GD, .MN and .VG were suspended by their registrar, alongside several other TPB related domains. The domain troubles make the site hard to reach through the usual channels, but The Pirate Bay still has some backups in reserve.

Last May the Stockholm District Court ordered the Pirate Bay’s .SE domains to be handed over to the Swedish state, a decision which is currently being appealed.

In a response The Pirate Bay decided to quickly redirect its visitors to a ‘Hydra’ of six new domain names in case the .SE domains were lost for good.

The notorious torrent site decided to use more than one domain name, anticipating that not all would survive pressure from copyright holders.

This was no unnecessary precaution as the first domain name was quickly suspended following an intervention from the associated registry, which soon chopped off the first head.

Today, the Hydra lost its remaining heads after TPB’s domain registrar took over all remaining domain names.

This morning ThePirateBay.la, ThePirateBay.gd, ThePirateBay.mn and ThePirateBay.vg were all listed as “clienthold” by the registry and the same is true for several other official TPB domains including those using the .FM, .SH, .MU and .TW extensions. This means they are no longer accessible, once all DNS entries are updates.

All affected domain names are linked to the same service and registered to Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij. According to ICANN the clienthold status is uncommon and “usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.”

Pirate Bay’s .LA Whois



As a result of the domain troubles The Pirate Bay is currently not reachable (cached DNS entries aside, but these will expire soon) through the usual ThePirateBay.se domain, which redirects to the domains listed above. However, the .org domain remains operational and the same is true for the .onion address.

At this point there is no official statement on the reason for the seizures/suspensions. The responsible registrar appears to be Idotz.net, which is a U.S. based 1api/Hexonet reseller.

TorrentFreak has asked Idotz for a comment but we were informed that they are unable to respond to third-party queries regarding domain names due to customer privacy reasons.

Not all domain registrars and registries are equally responsive to copyright complaints. Some suspend a domain name after a single complaint, while others require a local court order before taking action.

The Mongolian registry, which is behind TPB’s .MN domain name, previously informed TF that they will process potential complaints through ICANN’s Dispute Resolution Policy, suggesting that they will not take any voluntary action.

Still, that didn’t prevent the registrar from putting the .MN domain name on hold today.

Considering Pirate Bay’s defiant stance it’s likely that a copyright holder complaint triggered the current actions, but that hasn’t been confirmed. The TPB team has yet to make an official statement on the problems.

We will update this article should more information become available.

Update: The existing .se redirects were removed. TPB is operating exclusively from the .se domain for the time being.