Just weeks after the closure of one of the biggest torrent website’s KickassTorrents and the arrest of its founder Artem Vaulin by the US authorities, the most popular torrent meta-search engine Torrentz.eu has shockingly announced ‘farewell’ to millions of its users.
It seems that the torrent search engine has apparently been shutdown, because only the homepage of the website is live at the moment. It displays a welcome message saying that,
Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines.
While the homepage looks exactly the same but it is now not returning search results to any of the queries. You’re instead being redirected to a new page with another message — “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.” This one’s actually more disappointing and hints that the Torrentz.eu is done for good.
Both the messages also feature a sadistic cat with big teary eyes, looking right at you.
Torrentz.eu was launched over 13 years ago in 2003, and like other torrent websites it did not host its own torrents/links. It was more of a torrent aggregator and a search engine that was used to index torrents from other popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, ExtraTorrent etc. You could enter your query and search for relevant content from numerous other websites — as stated above.
In addition to this, it seems that other Torrentz domains including .ME, .CH, and .IN have also been shutdown and are now displaying the same message as above. TorrentFreak reports that it was contacted by the operator of Torrentz, who prefers not to comment on the situation at the moment.
Losing two of the biggest and oldest Torrent websites in a matter of weeks is a big blow for users on the Internet, but a huge win for the copyright holders who’ve been requesting the U.S government to take down the infringing links.
There is currently no more information — other than the two messages on the website — on the decision of the sudden farewell, but we expect to hear the reason behind the same from the founders pretty soon. Till then — just like KickassTorrents — you can only expect others to put up clones of the biggest and oldest Torrent website, but it will never be the same.
