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Torrentz.eu disabled its search service on August 5, 2016, displaying the message, “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.” The shutdown came 16 days after U.S. authorities announced the arrest of alleged Kickass Torrents operator Artem Vaulin—but no public evidence established that the two events were connected.
What happened to Torrentz.eu?
The site’s homepage remained accessible, but its search function no longer returned results and its torrent links were unavailable. The farewell message and the homepage’s past-tense description indicated a shutdown rather than an ordinary brief outage. Contemporaneous reports also said the closure affected related Torrentz domains, including .me, .ch and .in; that domain list was reported at the time, rather than confirmed by an official notice. (Scroll.in; The Hacker News)
Torrentz.eu had operated since 2003 and was widely described as one of the largest torrent-search services. The site’s significance came from its role as a search intermediary, not from a claim that it was the single source of the files it indexed. (The Next Web)
A meta-search engine, not a conventional torrent repository
Torrentz.eu was a BitTorrent meta-search engine: it gathered or indexed listings from other search and torrent sites, including sources such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents and ExtraTorrent, and presented results in one place. It was therefore different from a single-site repository. A search engine can point users toward listings hosted elsewhere; disabling that search service does not itself remove the underlying files or end the BitTorrent protocol, which also has lawful uses. (The Hacker News)
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What happened to Kickass Torrents 16 days earlier?
On July 20, 2016, U.S. authorities announced that Artem Vaulin, a Ukrainian national, had been arrested in Poland. Prosecutors accused him of operating Kickass Torrents and charged him by criminal complaint with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. The government also announced court-ordered seizures of seven domains associated with the alleged operation and sought Vaulin’s extradition to the United States. (U.S. Department of Justice)
The scale figures in the government’s announcement were allegations, not independent measurements or court findings. Prosecutors said Kickass Torrents received more than 50 million unique visitors a month, ranked 69th among websites, and made copyrighted material collectively valued at more than $1 billion available. The complaint was not a conviction; the Justice Department said Vaulin was presumed innocent unless proven guilty. (criminal complaint and affidavit; DOJ announcement)
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Was Torrentz.eu seized or shut down because of the case?
Neither point was established in the contemporaneous reporting. The Kickass Torrents action had a public arrest announcement, criminal charges and domain-seizure orders. Torrentz.eu’s closure, by contrast, was reported as a sudden disabling of search followed by a farewell message; no matching public seizure notice or arrest announcement concerning its operators was identified in those reports. (Scroll.in; DOJ)
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteTorrentz.eu did not publicly explain why it closed. Its results had included Kickass Torrents, and the shutdown followed the enforcement action by just over two weeks, making the timing notable. But timing and context are not proof of causation: the available reports do not establish that Torrentz.eu received a legal warning, was targeted by the same investigation, or closed because of Vaulin’s arrest. Calling the closure a confirmed government takedown would go beyond the evidence.
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A reported successor, but no confirmed link
A report published on August 10, 2016, said a site calling itself Torrentz2.eu had appeared days after the original shutdown. It was described as a clone or successor, but that report did not establish that the original Torrentz team operated it. A familiar name or copied design is not proof of continuity, and the site should not be treated as an authenticated replacement. (Business Today)
The episode captured a broader feature of the 2016 enforcement climate: action against a prominent service could disrupt access to its index or domains without eliminating the underlying network or every other index. Mirrors and replacement domains could appear, but their presence did not establish that a closed service had returned or that the new site was operated by the same people.
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