The Pirate Bay was down across the United States for at least three hours on Friday, an outage that comes as the site's latest bandwidth provider comes under pressure from entertainment companies.
CNET noted that the site was down at 1:22 p.m. PDT but appeared to come back up at 4:50 p.m. PDT. The cause for the blackout was unclear. Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of The Pirate Bay's co-founders did not respond to interview requests.
The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent search engine loved by file sharers but loathed by many copyright owners, has had trouble in the past few months with its Internet service providers. The most recent example came on Thursday night when a Ukrainian ISP cut off service to the site after receiving legal threats from copyright owners, according to the blog TorrentFreak.
The Pirate Bay was operational Friday morning so Enigmax from TorrentFreak speculated the search engine likely had a substitute provider ready to go. It's possible there were technical issues involved with the switchover.
The Pirate Bay was forced to look for a new ISP after a Swedish court, at the request of the trade groups representing the music and film industries, threatened The Pirate Bay's former ISP provider with fines unless it stopped servicing the site.
Earlier on Friday, Google stopped indexing The Pirate Bay but later acknowledged it booted the site from its search results by mistake.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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