Two weeks after pirates’ favorite search engine KickassTorrents closed doors following the arrest of alleged founder Artem Vaulin in Poland, the torrent community has lost another major player today – and this time it’s Torrentz.eu.
After more than 13 years of service, the popular site announced its farewell just a few hours ago. While the homepage is still active, Torrentz has completely disabled its search functionality and has similarly removed all torrent links.
Although it did not host torrents of its own, the site quickly became one of the world’s largest meta-search engines, indexing torrents from a wide variety of trackers and catering to millions of users each day.
The reasons for the shutdown are yet to be revealed. The only details available are a few mysterious lines of text referring to the site in past tense:
Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines.
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With Torrentz now virtually defunct, the torrent community has lost two of its largest sources in the window of less than three weeks.
In the case of KickassTorrents, it didn’t take long before a number of mirror sites surfaced on the Web, promptly filling up the gap the prominent tracker left. We’re yet to see whether similar circumstances will follow with Torrentz.
via TorrentFreak
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