Bad news for Torrent fans. The second-largest torrent site in the world (after The Pirate Bay), ExtraTorrent is no longer working. And ExtraTorrent’s chief who goes by the codename SaM confirms that the website is closing down permanently. As sad it sounds, that is what is happening.
Anyone visiting ExtraTorrent’s home page will be faced by the following message:
“ExtraTorrent has shut down permanently.”
“ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline.. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones. Thx to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to be….”
TorretFreak reached out to SaM and here’s what he had to say about the matter: “It’s time we say goodbye.” And later added, “Ettv and Ethd could remain operational if they get enough donations to sustain the expenses and if they people handling it ready to keep going.”
This isn’t the first Torrent site to have gone down. KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, TorrentHound, and What.cd went offline previously. But shortly afterward, a number mirror and clone sites had come up like Torrentz2.eu and KickAssTorrents that are believed to be maintained by the people of the original site but of course, that has been denied.
They haven’t made it clear what exactly happened to have prompted them to take down the website completely. But this isn’t the first time TorrentFreak have had to face challenges. The website was launched back in 2006 and went on to become more popular than TorrentSpy and Mininova. Like we said before the site ranks second right after The Pirate Bay. In November 2015, three domain names of ExtraTorrent were lost but we never found out why. They did quickly manage to replace the domain names with newer ones though.
ExtraTorrent went completely down on 17 May 2017. It’s probably worth mentioning here that back in March 2017, the main domain name was shut down but the domains were still operational.