Popular torrent site ExtraTorrent website has permanently shut down. The abrupt decision was announced a few hours ago in a brief message posted on the site’s homepage. This means that after the demise of KickassTorrents and Torrentz.eu, the torrent community must say farewell to another major players.
In a surprise move, ExtraTorrent decided to shut down today, for good now.
Users who access the site’s homepage(extra.to) are welcomed by a short but clear message on the page, indicating that the popular torrents index will not return (the message appears intermittently).
“ExtraTorrent has shut down permanently.”
“ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline.. We permanently erase all data in our servers. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clone. Thx to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to be….”
TorrentFreak reached out to ExtraTorrent operator SaM who confirmed that this is indeed the end of the road for the website.
“It’s time we say goodbye,” he said, without providing more detail.
With ExtraTorrent’s demise the BitTorrent community has lost yet another prominent players. Whether this also means the end of associated release groups, such as EtHD and ettv, remain to be seen.
ExtraTorrent was founded in November 2006, at a time when sites such as TorrentSpy and Mininova were dominating the landscape. Nonetheless, ExtraTorrent was determined to develop an audience of its own.
The site went on to outgrow many of its predecessor and with millions of daily visitors, ExtraTorrent ended up as the second largest torrents site, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay.
The site’s popularity placed it in the crosshair of various entertainment industry groups in recent month. These outfits regularly pressured hosting companies and domains name services to take actions.
It’s unclear whether legal pressure had anything to do with the decisions to shut down, but that wouldn’t come as a surprise.
ExtraTorrent is the latest in a series of BitTorrent giant to fall in recent months. Previously, sites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, TorrentHound and What.cd went offline.
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