The Pirate Bay is suffering some downtime this morning due to a DDoS attack that appears to originate from a Twitter user who goes by the handle Zeiko Anonymous. The connection flood targeted at the site originates from a small botnet and isn't worrying The Pirate Bay team too much. Instead, the BitTorrent site is taking this opportunity to do some database maintenance.

Over the past few days a person that goes by the nick “Zeiko” has caused quite a bit of trouble in the BitTorrent world.

After being denied an invite to the private BitTorrent tracker What.cd, he or she went on a rampage, hitting half a dozen BitTorrent sites with DDoS attacks.

The initial targets were private BitTorrent trackers and these have all since come back online. However, it appears that the DDoS attacks are not over yet. A few hours ago Zeiko shifted his aim towards public BitTorrent sites.

On Twitter thepiratebay.se was announced as the new target and not long thereafter the most-visited BitTorrent site did indeed go offline.

The first attack started about 9 hours ago, and The Pirate Bay eventually recovered, but went offline again after the second attack was announced.

The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are indeed suffering from a SYN flood that originates from a small botnet. Nothing new for the BitTorrent site, who have decided to make use of the unexpected downtime by doing some maintenance on The Pirate Bay’s backend.

“It’s just a normal SYN flood from a small botnet,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak

“We’re taking the break to do some much-needed database upgrades. The site will come back as soon as we’re done with that.”

Last month The Pirate Bay moved its operation to the cloud so it’s better able to withstand outside attacks. Although cloud hosting does makes it easier for the site to recover from hardware failure and even a police raid, it is still hard to withstand DDoS attacks.

Despite the occasional downtime The Pirate Bay continues to expand its user base. It’s nearing the list of 50 most visited sites on the Internet and is currently ranked 13th in Sweden.

Update: The Pirate Bay is back again.

Update: isoHunt and Fenopy are targeted as well. The first is down at the time of writing.

Update: The Pirate Bay is down again and isoHunt is back in Europe.

Update: Bitsnoop is down as well.

Update: TorrentPortal and 1337x are offline as well.