Almost two months after Swedish authorities seized several servers belonging to the torrent mega engine, The Pirate Bay, the domain was offline for several weeks leaving millions with an unable to connect error, and today, the site is right on schedule, a day early and alive once again.

The Pirate Bay crew informed the public that The Pirate Bay would be back online February 1, but not in the traditional sense. What was meant by this is the original Pirate Bay staff members would not aboard. According to many previous staffers of the torrent site, a few owners took over and left hundreds of administrators, moderators, and clean up crew members essentially fired.

Though the countless members that helped keep The Pirate Bay a clean and safe environment may not have been payed per say, they were still fired from The Pirate Bay and unable to access the site. No longer is there a large crew working to keep the site in its old condition.

The Pirate Bay is once again online, after nearly two months of downtime, the longest downtime the torrent bazaar had ever experienced. Prior to their December 2014 raid, The Pirate Bay had been offline and raided once prior, leaving the site offline for three days. Though, through the thick and thin of owners getting arrested, extradited or just leaving the team, The Pirate Bay had remained online til just two months ago.

Just a few hours ago, The Pirate Bay started serving an image of a Phoenix, and appearing functional once again.

As the site is still getting itself together after two months of downtime, the site does lack some features, and many believe it won’t return to its former glory. The Pirate Bay does not have any ads at the moment, but the site does look and feel similar, and users state all user accounts are working properly as well. As of the time of writing this article the “Contact Us,” “RSS” and “Register” pages are not operational, serving up a 404 error message.

Based on the recent torrent status on the site, it appears data loss was minimal to zero throughout the raid. The latest upload on the site was December 9 2014, the exact day the site went offline and authorities seized their servers.

As stated previously, while the site on the outside appears untouched, the backend is a mess. The Pirate Bay staff are no longer able to access the moderation panel.

Earlier this week Pirate Bay staff had told TorrentFreak insiders that old staff would be locked out and no longer apart of the reborn domain. TorrentFreak said this type of streamlining would make it easier to manage and lower the risk of the site being brought down for a third time.

The alleged “optimizations” caused distaste throughout the sites original staff members, leaving them abandon.

The Pirate Bay’s ex-lead administrator told reporters they were launching their own version of The Pirate Bay, which they believe will be the “real one.”

And these former staff will also relaunch the official Suprbay forum, though, the “new” torrent engine is no longer listing Suprbay in its links section.

To cause a little more havoc, due to Pirate Bay’s prolonged downtime, various spin-offs made their way into light and accumulated millions of visitors with a steady userbase. Such as Isohunt’s OldPirateBay.org domain, which is currently the largest and most active version which has earned itself the number one search term for Pirate Bay in Google.

Another major change is The Pirate Bay’s hosting provider. In the past, The Pirate Bay used their own self-built hosting solutions, then they moved across a number of hosts, then to their own virtual machines among various other solutions. Now The Pirate Bay is running on CloudFlare, a web performance and security company. The change is huge as CloudFlare is based right in the heart of the United States (San-Francisco), a country that is not fond of The Pirate Bay or copyright violations.

As CloudFlare still requires the site to be run on a backend webhost, The Pirate Bay’s hosting solution remains masked by CloudFlare for the moment, but it will be interesting to see what will come of The Pirate Bay, CloudFlare and the law.

What will come of the Pirate Bay’s reopening will be seen in time. One thing is for sure, there is a lot of decision making to be done among users and staffers.