The popular torrent meta-search engine Torrentz2 left its millions of users confused late last year when all links to torrents suddenly disappeared. Was this the end of the site? It appears not, as the site has just been restored to its former glory.

When the original Torrentz site shut down during the summer of 2016, several copies jumped in to fill its shoes.

The most successful alternative, in terms of traffic, was the elegantly named Torrentz2.eu. Unlike many others, Torrentz2 has always been upfront with its users and never claimed to be an official resurrection.

This approach worked, as millions of users were drawn to the site. However, just before Christmas the site suddenly removed all links to external torrent sites. Instead of a metasearch engine, it turned into a database of torrent metadata, and traffic started to drop off.

The message on the site’s homepage changed as well. Instead of claiming to be “a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines,” it turned into “is a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine.”

As the weeks rolled by, many people thought that the links would never return. While the homepage was updated briefly to promote a freelancer ICO, not much happened. Until this week.

Just as abruptly as the torrent links disappeared last month, they were added again, returning Torrent2 to its former glory. At the time of writing, the site list links to 61,111,077 torrents on 82 domains.

Torrentz2 with links



So what happened here?

TorrentFreak reached out to the operator of the site to find out more. He replied, but at the moment he prefers not to comment on the disappearing links incident or the site’s future.

That leaves us with nothing else than speculation really. Perhaps there was a technical error, an operational change, a simple mistake, or outside intervention? We simply don’t know.

The only real conclusion we can draw is that, at least for the casual observer, Torrentz2 appears to be back where it used to be. For now…