Two Largest Bittorrent Trackers Offline

Two of the worlds largest bittorent trackers have been offline the past couple of days, and will continue to suffer downtime throughout the week. Popular bittorrent trackers, OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent have been offline for the past couple of days. The two widely available bittorent trackers are used among many public bittorent sites, and used along with several other trackers. The OpenBiTorrent and PublicBitTorrent team reached out to TorrentFreak and noted

The tracker is replacing some hardware, a process that could take a week or more to complete. In any event, there is no doubt that the tracker will continue business as usual in the near future.

We also reached out to PublicBitTorrent, whose owner confirmed they are also working on maintenance issues. There is currently no ETA for when the tracker will return, but the current downtime will continue for several days at least.

While the trackers are offline many torrents will still survive despite the downtime. Many torrent files have other trackers attached to them, and can survive solely on DHT and PEX. This allows downloaders to get information on other peers from each other, instead of a tracker controlling the traffic. While these torrents may survive these two trackers are offline completely. If any torrent strictly relies on one of these two trackers, that file may be offline for another week or so.

OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent were recently noted to organize downloads of 30 million people at any point in time. In total the public trackers are amounting to three billion connections every single day. The downtime these trackers may suffer could put many torrents offline. As of the moment, istole.it, is the largest bittorrent tracker online.

While the maintenance occurs don’t be alarmed if occasional public torrents don’t work.