The popular Demonoid.com, a semi-private BitTorrent tracker, has been taken offline.
Both the torrent tracker and the site have been unresponsive for over twenty-four hours.
Although there has been no official word, or statement from the Demonoid administrators, the Dutch news site nu.nl reports that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is responsible for the downtime.
TorrentFreak reports that it contacted some of the Demonoid administrators, but even they are not yet sure what happened to the site.
If it does turn out to be the CRIA, this won’t be the first time Demonoid has suffered major downtime due to pressure from the recording industry.
Earlier this year Demonoid moved its servers from The Netherlands to Canada after a Dutch anti-piracy group filed a subpoena demanding the site’s ISP remove Demonoid and cough up the administrator’s identities.
It would seem that Canada is not the safe harbor Demonoid was seeking and we suspect that the site will likely move its servers again.
While The Pirate Bay is still the most popular torrent tracker online, Demonoid is a close second.
Much of the site’s popularity stems from the fact that membership is limited and strict ratio tracking means Demonoid is faster than most trackers.
Demonoid is also remarkably free of the spam and fake torrents released by groups like the recently exposed MediaDefender.
Although the site requires registration for older torrents, Demonoid recently began offering the newer torrents (within the last two weeks) to the general public.
So far there’s no word on when Demonoid may come back online, but as with the resurrected Suprnova.org, it would seem that you just can’t keep a popular torrent site down for long.
