The famous torrent tracker was banned by domain registry

Feb 9, 2015 12:34 GMT  ·  By

After The Pirate Bay, which came back online in late January, another controversial torrent service goes down all of a sudden. This time, it's KickAssTorrents that's experiencing an outage, as its .so domain name has apparently been banned by the Somalian registry.

Details are missing right now, but the server doesn't seem to respond and a query on the official KickassTorrents domain reveals the banned status that confirms the reason for the outage affecting users from all over the world.

Basically, no one can access KickAss right now and site operators need to find a new domain name, just like they did several times in the past when they tried to avoid getting banned because of copyright complaints.

Still no reason for ban

What's more interesting to find out is the actual reason for the ban that KickAssTorrents received on its domain this morning.

It's a well-known fact that this particular service has often been criticized for providing easy access to pirated content, so one would think that the ban came following a complaint received by Somalian authorities.

At this point, no other KAT domain that was used in the past seems to respond, so the service must get a new domain name if site operators want the torrent tracker to live on.

KickAssTorrents is the second top name that goes down in just a couple of months, after The Pirate Bay was taken offline in December following a raid conducted by the Swedish police. TPB, however, returned online in late January after spending nearly 50 days offline and continues to be available right now at its standard domain name.

The same is very likely to happen with KickAssTorrents as well, but site operators are yet to provide more details on what exactly happened this time, but expect the service to become available once again at a new domain name anytime soon.

Update: the .to domain is working once again, while .so is still banned.