UPDATE 'Pirate Bay' down for 18 hours

UPDATE 'Pirate Bay' down for 18 hours

The world's top downloading site, The Pirate Bay, went down worldwide for 18 hours before returning Monday morning, including proxy sites linked to it.

The monitoring website TorrentFreak said The Pirate Bay disappeared without warning, and could not be contacted after 2:36pm Sunday. It was available again in Bangkok shortly before 10:30am Monday.

"Every time the site goes offline for a few minutes thousands of people start to worry that something awful has happened to their beloved site," a TorrentFreak blog post reported. "TorrentFreak contacted the Pirate Bay admins to find out more, but we have yet to hear back from them."

The site has gone off the internet before, for technical reasons. But there also was speculation that one or more governments have moved to remove The Pirate Bay from the internet, as they did in a US-led case last year which saw the end of Megaupload, described as the world's largest depository of illegal files.

The Pirate Bay has been publicly accused of hosting the world's largest collection of links to pirated material, including software, music, movies and more.

It helped to spread the popularity of downloading by torrent, a decentralised system where files are downloaded piece by piece from many places, so there is no necessity of any site or individual to host and illegally share the file.

The operators of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year in prison in their country, but appeal continue. One of the Swedes was extradited from Cambodia last year, and another, who has a Thai wife, lives in Laos.

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