Torrentz, RIP!

This is going to be one of the biggest demises of the year. TORRENTZ, the world’s largest torrent search engine, founded in 2003 and ruling for 13 years, suddenly shut down without any notice or explanation. This was the end of the “Google” of the torrenting world.

For those of you who are not familiar with torrenting, it’s a file-sharing technique that spreads data across multiple computers. The most common usage of this was for piracy. This meta-search engine, however hosted no torrents of its own but linked to other sites including The Pirate Bay. That made it a major presence not just within the torrenting community, but on the Internet at large. Before it shut down, it was 186 on web-ranking service Alexa, putting it ahead of sites like Weather.com and Flickr.

But how come did a king like Torrentz shut down? Speculations are that this was the result of another giant being caught by the authorities about two weeks ago.  

But now any site user is no longer able to login. Instead, they see the following message:

“Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.”