The popular torrent hosting site, The Pirate Bay went down late last night after a bug in the NTP daemon crashed theDebian Linux powered server. The SuprBay forum, hosted by The PirateBay put details of what caused the crash. The first impression people got when the site went down was that site might have been blocked by the ISP or the site was taken down by government officials. It turns out that was not the case, as the post made on the forum describes that the site went down due to the bug. The NTP bug is to do with the leap second increment that is added at midnight. A bug in the kernel caused ThePirateBay and some other sites running similar software to crash.When we checked last, the site was still down and it’s likely to be up in the next few hours. The Pirate Bay has gone down in the past for some upgrades. File hosting and torrent hosting sites have come under attack by the media industry and law enforcement agencies around the world. India has been the latest to have joined the ‘BitTorrent sites ban’ bandwagon, resulting in the ban of sites, like ThePirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop and other large BitTorrent websites and popular video-sharing website, Vimeo. Users lost access to these websites, and those trying to access these websites were met by an announcement by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), which states that the website has been blocked “as per instructions from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).” The latest ban, affecting the blackout of the aforementioned websites,thereby snapping access, comes as a continuation to what has been a long battle against such BitTorrent websites. Reports have itthat the ban was a government-directed one, and subscribers to all major Internet serviceproviders in the country seem to be among those affected. Recently, ISPs have started unblocking sites and most of the banned sites seem to have been opened up. However, there are still a few ISPs blocking them.
