After last week's sudden shutdown of Kickass Torrents, the most popular site of its kind in the world, file sharers are now turning to other alternative sites to access content. One week later, Pirate Bay, Torrentz and ExtraTorrent appear to be benefiting the most from the forced exodus based on prior traffic patterns, forum posts and firsthand reports.

A week ago, the online file sharing community was rocked when the U.S. government shut down the world's largest torrent site, Kickass Torrents. Although reports several days later heralded its return, this was not actually the case, as many misinterpreted the emergence of clone sites and mirrors featuring cached files as the resurrection of the actual site itself. In reality, these clone and mirror sites, when legitimate, could only provide content available on Kickass Torrents prior to its shutdown, with no new material available due to lack of upload capabilities.

Immediately, former users of Kickass Torrents began searching for replacement sites. An obvious alternative emerged in the form of The Pirate Bay, with many Kickass Torrents users claiming to have switched back to the old stalwart, which has gone through many shutdowns and comebacks of its own, but has remained remarkably resilient and stable in the last year or so. It was the former inconsistency of The Pirate Bay that had led many of its former users to switch to Kickass Torrents, so its format and user interface were already familiar to many of the newly displaced users.

Many also visited the popular Torrentz site, which does not actually host any files but serves as a meta search engine which then redirects users to other sites on the web.

Another popular destination for former Kickass Torrents users was ExtraTorrent. The growing site was recently listed as the third most popular torrent site for 2016, and an operator at the site confirmed a huge influx of new users just one day after Kickass' takedown, reporting a 200 percent increase in signups and 300 percent increase in traffic at ExtraTorrent.

"It is sad to see an iconic site go this way, and it shows how the torrent community is targeted by all means. But, I guess torrenting will prevail and this doesn't mean the death or end of this era," ExtraTorrent's operator added.

In fact, Kickass Torrents' active and large community, one of its greatest assets, has reconvened, sans torrents, at a new website, Katcr.co, where many of the site's former moderators and administrators are now gathering. Their objective: to keep the community alive in hope that the former owners, to which the new site creators have no connection, will resurrect Kickass Torrents in the future.

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