How the Pirate Bay works

old computer monitors ready for recycling

It was built to resist police action.

The Pirate Bay is down. So what happens next?

Swedish police raided the notorious file sharing website yesterday, seizing servers and computers over copyright violations that have been the cause of legal battles for more than ten years since the site’s launch.

In terms of historical significance, the Pirate Bay is up there with Napster as a world-famous website that has changed the Internet forever. It’s been raided multiple times before, and it’s always come back to life in short order. The website’s fans hope this time is no different.

The key to the Pirate Bay’s relative immunity from shutdowns is the tenacious technology on which it’s built.

How the pirates work

For the last two years, the Pirate Bay has been upgrading its infrastructure in order to resist police actions.

In 2012, the site moved to the cloud. It operated on servers from cloud-hosting providers around the world. The site was becoming decentralized, cheaper to operate, and harder for law enforcement to put in their crosshairs.

By 2014, the Pirate Bay had gotten rid of all of its own hardware and moved the entire site to 21 virtual machines hosted around the world using less than 620 gigabytes of storage for the entire operation, smaller than many people have on their personal computers these days.

“All virtual machines (VMs) are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers,” TorrentFreak reported earlier this year. “All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB.”

The entire purpose of the setup is that when the cops knock the door down, like they did yesterday, the Pirate Bay’s operators can disconnect the rest of the servers and rebuild elsewhere.

What happened Monday isn’t entirely clear, but it seems that police raided and shut down the front end load balancer from the Pirate Bay, the cloud server that all the site’s traffic initially passes through. That’s a very important part of the operation but entirely replaceable.

Within hours of the raid, false reports hit of Pirate Bay replacements coming up from countries like Costa Rica. Some of these operations are malicious phishing websites while others are empty shells. Would-be pirates ought to be very careful before they dive right into the supposed next Bay.

But that doesn’t mean the Bay is gone for good. If the website’s infrastructure was built as advertised to resist exactly the sort of police raid that hit just over 24 hours ago, the site could be back up and running within the next few days.

Photo via Victoria Reay/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

Patrick Howell O'Neill

Patrick Howell O'Neill
