Torrentz, one of the most popular torrent search engines in the world, has ended its service for seemingly no reason. Could the company be facing legal issues, or has it just decided to get out while it can?
If you go to Torrentz.eu, the website still looks essentially the same as it always has, except for one line of text in the middle of the page. It describes the website in the past tense, implying that the website has ended its search engine services. This is the only page on Torrentz that you can still view.
If you attempt perform a search or navigate to any other page on the site, the page will just refresh itself, and the text on the page will update to say, “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.” Clearly, the site is no longer providing its search engine service.
Although torrents are often used to legally distribute files, the most notable use of torrents has been to illegally share content. Websites involved with illegal torrents have been under attack for years by government agencies and businesses in an attempt to shut the torrents down.
It does not appear that Torrentz is facing legal action at this time, so it isn’t completely clear why the site ended its service. Recently, another major torrenting site, Kickasstorrents, was shut down, and the site’s owner is facing serious legal charges. It is possible that this concerned Torrentz’s owners enough that they preemptively shut down the site before legal charges were brought against them.
Interestingly, the company appears to have retained ownership of its domain, though. It is possible the site could be investigating other uses for the domain in order to remain in business. Although most torrents on the net are illegal, there are a large number of legal torrents used by software and content developers as a more economical method of distributing files. Perhaps the site will one day resume its service, but with search results limited to legal torrents only.
