The popular BitTorrent site mininova has been down for a few hours due to hardware issues. It is expected that the downtime will continue for several hours, which puts other BitTorrent sites under pressure.

Mininova’s Erik told TorrentFreak that there are problems with the network card of the loadbalancer, one of the parts they don’t have a backup for.

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded