Top Torrent Trackers All Return Online

[ALAN30]

The Pirate Bay raid and various technical issues have caused headaches for the three of the largest BitTorrent trackers over the past month, but all have now returned. In addition, the people behind OpenBitTorrent have launched a separate tracker to share the load and help to serve millions of torrent users.

OpenBitTorrent, PublicBT and Istole.it are three of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.

This means that these non-commercial services handle a staggering three billion connections per day – each.

However, over the past several weeks the three trackers have been offline most of the time. While they have had their fair share of downtime in the past, it’s not often that these top trackers become unresponsive all at once.

OpenBitTorrent was the first to go offline early December. The domain name, registered to Pirate Bay’s Fredrik Neij, disappeared without notice leaving many downloaders in the cold.

Not much later the PublicBT and Istole.it trackers folded too. The latter was hit by the Pirate Bay raid as collateral damage, alongside several other BitTorrent related services.

During the weeks that followed the three trackers have worked hard on a comeback. There have been ups and downs, but now they’re all up and running again.

TF spoke to the operators of OpenBitTorrent (OBT) who explained that server issues were the root cause of its initial problems. After a few changes behind the scenes, the tracker eventually found a new home at a befriended torrent site.

“Through IRC we proceeded looking for a safe provider and we had an offer from a torrent site that was willing to let us use one of their servers for the tracker,” OBT tells TF.

While the tracker is up and running for most people, there may still be some stability issues, we were told.

“We are currently facing stability issues due to a large amount of users trying to connect to the tracker, so there might be some downtime until we stabilize.”

In order to make the tracker ecosystem more resilient one of the OpenBitTorrent developers has now launched a separate tracker, BTZoo.eu. The OBT team encourages torrent users to use both trackers.

“We’re planning on sharing the peers of OpenBitTorrent with BTZoo.eu and have users also use that tracker as it will help lower the load of the tracker at this crucial stage,” OBT told us.

During the weeks to come OpenBitTorrent’s operators hope things will normalize. In the meantime, they hope to revive some other Pirate Bay affiliated ventures including Bayfiles.net, but more on that later.

http://torrentfreak.com/top-torrent-trackers-return-online-150106/