14 DAY TRIAL // The second most popular torrent site in the world, ExtraTorrent, has officially shut down.
Earlier today, after facing some downtime over the weekend, the site announced that it was shutting down via a brief message on its homepage.
"ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones," the message reads.
The decision to shut down is a surprise move, especially since the site has so many users. Those who visited the site today were welcomed by the aforementioned message, much to their confusion.
TorrentFreak has been in contact with the site's operator, SaM, who confirmed it was the end of the line for them. "It's time we say goodbye," he said, but didn't go into details about the reasons why the site is shutting down, what happened and if there was any link between the shutdown and the server downtime it went through a few days ago.
Over a decade spent online
ExtraTorrent was founded in November 2006, making it one of the oldest BitTorrent sites around. Back then, sites like Mininova were dominating. In fact, it was with Mininova's demise that ExtraTorrent started to grow.
It did this so well that it managed to reach far more users than its predecessors ever had, at least in terms of daily visitors. Reports indicate that ExtraTorrent scored several millions of those every day, with the only site to have more being The Pirate Bay.
It's unclear at this point if legal pressure is at fault for the site's shutdown. Considering that this has been the way other similar sites have gone down, it's not exactly something we can rule out.
Along with ExtraTorrent, its release group ETRG is also gone now. At the same time, according to SaM, Ettv and Ethd could remain operational if donations manage to sustain the expenses.