The popular torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB)
suffered a widespread outage today as reported by several media outlets:
BBC,
TorrentFreak,
PC Magazine,
ZDNet,
The Huffington Post and many others.
To understand why The Pirate Bay disappeared, we'll look at them from a routing perspective, noting that without widely accepted routes to their IP space, they will lack global connectivity. TPB operates an autonomous system, AS 51040, which has two Internet service providers, namely, ROBTEX (AS 48285) and Serious Tubes Networks (AS 50066). TPB also has several peers, the most prominent of which is Hurricane Electric (AS 6939). To provide their services, The Pirate Bay originates two IP networks or prefixes: 194.14.56.0/24 (Pirate Networks) and 194.71.107.0/24 (The Pirate Bay). The 194.14.56.0/24 prefix appears to be TPB's core network, while 194.71.107.0/24 appears to host TPB's main domains, such as piratebay.net, piratebay.org, thepiratebay.com etc.
