One Of The World's Largest Torrent Websites Said Goodbye, And Shuts Down

01/06/2023

RARBG, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, suddenly ceased its operations.

What was once the fourth most popular torrent tracker in the world, according to the profile publication TorrentFreak, RARBG cited the COVID-19 pandemic and war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as rising electricity prices and inflation, as the cause of the issue..

The closure happened without prior notification.

It's only after the shut down, that the peer-to-peer file-sharing website posted a goodbye message on its front page, blaming the turbulent happening in the past two years that pushed the administrators to close down the website.

The website owners lamented they could no longer bear the costs of upkeeping the massive site.

RARBG.to, after ceasing its operations.

Visitors visiting RARBG.to homepage can see an apologetic message from administrators:

"Hello guys. We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us – some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all."

"Some are also fighting the war in Europe – on both sides. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare."

"Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket."

"After an unanimous vote we’ve decided that we can no longer do it."

"We are sorry. Bye."

RARBG, which specialized in pirated releases of movies and TV series, was launched in 2008 as a Bulgarian BitTorrent tracker (BG in the name means the domain of Bulgaria), before changing its profile to appeal the international audience, focusing on English-language releases.

Due to the illegality of the content exhibited on the website, several countries have banned access to it, including the UK, Ireland, Italy, Finland, and others.

And certainly, many have tried to terminate the website.

In fact, the first attempt to block RARBG happened back in 2008 due to copyright infringement, and in response Google removed the site from its search results in 2017.

But this case, is one of the few cases where a torrent tracker has closed on its own.

RARBG.to, before ceasing its operations.

The shutdown is considered one of the largest in the history of torrent sites, following the first major closure since the 2015-2016 period, when KickassTorrents, Torrentz, and ExtraTorrent had left the scene.

It's worth noting that the closure of RARBG isn't caused by the authorities, and was coordinated.

This is because the same goodbye message is displayed on every single web page and also RARBG domains that used to lead to the torrent website.

As one of the largest, RARBG that had more than 260,000 titles.

According to data from SimilarWeb, the website had more than 40 million monthly users in April 2023.

By comparison, The Pirate Bay, another popular torrent site, only saw about half of that, at 24 million visitors.