Torrent website RARBG ceases operations

31 May 2023

Economic Times

Synopsis

RARBG, which is a highly popular torrent site, has shut down abruptly. Here’s everything you may want to know about its closure.

Agencies

RARBG, which is one of the world’s largest torrent sites, has closed down. The website owners have cited the COVID pandemic and Ukraine war as the reasons behind the development.

The torrent tracker used to specialize in the pirated releases of movies and TV series. RARBG, which announced its closure recently, was launched in 2008 as a Bulgarian BitTorrent tracker. The site quickly started to cater to an international audience and focused on English-language releases.

In 2008, RARBG was blocked for the first time due to copyright infringement. In 2017, Google also removed it from its search results. The site was blocked presently in many countries. It is one of the few cases where a torrent site has shut down on its own.

While closing operations, the peer-to-peer file-sharing website also posted a goodbye message on its front page. The message read, “Hello guys, We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us – some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we’ve decided that we can no longer do it. We are sorry ???? Bye.”

FAQs

Q1:What is RARBG?
RARBG is one of the world’s largest pirate torrent trackers.

Q2:Why did RARBG close down?

RARBG closed down, citing COVID pandemic and the Ukraine war.

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