Yet another famous tracker shut down, this time in France

Nov 18, 2016 08:11 GMT  ·  By

Private music torrent tracker What.cd has gone offline a few hours ago, after what were reported to be police raids of servers in France.

A message posted on the tracker indicates that the website shut down, although there is no confirmation that a police raid was indeed at fault for the site’s shutdown.

“Due to some recent events, What.cd is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish,” the announcement posted this morning reads.

The message seems to suggest that the shutdown could be permanent, but also gives assurances that all data was destroyed before the police managed to seize the servers.

No arrests

Zataz Magazine reports that French authorities raided a total of 12 servers that were hosted at OVH, and another one at Free. No arrests were made, it seems, and it’s not clear if any data still existed on the servers, but given the admin’s announcement, this is very unlikely.

The cybercrime division of Gerdarmerie (C3N) confirmed police operations, but didn’t provide any indication that What.cd was indeed the target. The French music industry group SACEM (which stands for Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique) is partly responsible for the investigation and closely worked with authorities in taking down the website.

At the moment, the IRC channel used by What.cd is also offline, and there are small chances to see it returning if the tracker itself doesn’t come back online.

What.cd was one of the largest private music communities online, and the site administrators announced earlier this year that they hit one million unique music releases on the tracker. The community was growing at a fast pace since the 2007 debut, mostly because of the OiNK shutdown, so many of its members are already searching for a new home now that What.CD is unlikely to return (not soon, at least).