A fire at Swedish hosting company PRQ, owned by two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, brought down numerous torrent sites earlier today. Whilst it didn’t take out The PirateBay’s site, it did take down several of their ancillary activities, as well as other BitTorrent sites hosted there.

Initial reports are that the fire at PRQ was caused by a powerfeed to one UPS, which has now been fixed by an electrician, and that some boxes are now coming back up. The fire occurred sometime shortly before midday GMT, and took out approximately 200 servers.

PRQ’s Anakata told TorrentFreak that not everything went down because of the electrical fault, but that he had to kill the power to the entire facility in order to fix things. He added that none of the servers are permanently damaged.

The fire didn’t take out The Pirate Bay itself, much to the disappointment of some, including Swedish prosecutors. It has, however, disabled several other torrent sites and some of Pirate Bay’s services, including bayIMG, their court weblog and the Pirate Bay forums at SuprBay.

In 2007 several torrent sites moved to Sweden, and to PRQ in particular. Sweden is considered to be a safe haven for BitTorrent sites, and PRQ is popular because it is owned by TiAMO and Anakata, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Ironically, however, The Pirate Bay is not hosted in Sweden or at PRQ, which is probably a wise decision, you can’t have all your eggs in one basket.

Amongst the sites taken down were Waffles, Suprnova, Swebits and the popular TV-torrent site EZTV. Waffles posted the following notice on their site Read the rest of this entry »