The world’s most infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was taken down yesterday following a police raid in Sweden – and may already have found a new home in Costa Rica.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay has been accused of facilitating copyright violations throughout its existence, yet despite the efforts of creative industries, governments and anti-piracy groups it has consistently managed to stay afloat.

Police in Sweden confirmed the raid on Tuesday, which involved the seizure of servers and computers from a site in Stockholm.

Though they refused to give a specific location, the raid is believed to have taken place at a data centre in the mountainous region of Nacka outside the capital. The Pirate Bay had previously boasted of basing some servers in a “secret mountain complex”.

Paul Pinter, the national coordinator for the intellectual property crime branch of Stockholm County Police, told Reuters: “We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay.”

Speaking to Radio Sweden, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad said: “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many.”

A forum linked to Pirate Bay, Suprbay.org, was also reported as going offline, as were other file-sharing sites including EZTV, Zoink and Torrage.

It was unsure if Pirate Bay was taken down for hosting some of the movies leaked due to the recent cyber-attack on Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures Entertainment, tech website Wired reported.

Back in September, The Pirate Bay was reported to be “raid-proof”, running over the cloud on 21 “virtual machines” hosted by different internet providers around the world.

And according to RT.com – which featured a screenshot of the site – it has returned with a new web domain in Costa Rica (thepiratebay.cr).

Those reports were questioned by Torrent Freak, a regular source for information on The Pirate Bay, which claimed that the Costa Rica URL was in fact simply a proxy or mirror for the main site.

"There’s nothing to suggest that The Pirate Bay’s domains have fallen into the hands of the authorities," Torrent Freak reported, suggesting that its return to one of its previous addresses could only be a matter of time.

Josh Taylor, a ZDNet reporter, said: “The Pirate Bay going offline and returning in a matter of hours shows just how ineffective website blocking will ultimately be.”