On April 15, 2019, news broke that a private server based on "City of Heroes" at the time of its shutdown had been running in secret for years. Three days later, source code relating to the server had been widely distributed, and a publicly accessible server based on the code was quickly spun up. While perceived threats, legal or otherwise, saw this server shut down by April 22, multiple public servers by various teams have since been set up based on the leaked code. As of the end of December 2019, NCSoft has not made a move to terminate the operation of any of the servers. They have, however, objected to the distribution of "City of Heroes" content binaries themselves.