RARBG, one of the most popular torrent websites for getting high-quality versions of movies and TV shows, suddenly shut down its website today. It had been running since 2008, but apparently, a number of factors caused the people behind the site to close its virtual doors.
Right now, the RARBG site only has this brief and fairly rambling message. It describes the reasons for the site's closing:
Hello guys,
We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site.
The past 2 years have been very difficult for us - some of the people in our team died due to covid complications,
others still suffer the side effects of it - not being able to work at all.
Some are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES.
Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard.
Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare.
Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket.
After an unanimous vote we've decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(
Bye
Vice reports that the RARBG site had over 40 million visitors in April 2023, according to the website analytics tool Similarweb. Torrent Freak ranked it as the fourth biggest torrent site back in January 2023.
The shutdown was certainly sudden but not surprising. It's not a secret that hosting costs and energy costs have gone up worldwide overall and in Europe specifically. What was a bit surprising was that hearing some of the site's team members had passed away due to COVID-19, and that others on the team were hit with the same virus and suffered long term effects.
While the site's shutdown was a surprise, it seems likely that some of the other remaining higher end torrent sites will get some traffic spikes for a while.
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