Torrent sharing site KickassTorrents is unavailable on its kickass.so web address after the domain was seized by authorities, TorrentFreak reports.
One of the most prominent torrent sites around, KickassTorrents switched to a Somalian (.so) top level domain (TLD) in November. It was previously located on the kickass.to web address, a domain from Tonga.
While the kickass.so address is listed as "banned" by the Somalian .SO registry, the site already seems to have switched back to its old address, kickass.to. KickassTorrents says it rotates its domain on a regular basis, so there may have never been an issue with the Tongan domain.
Founded in 2008, KickassTorrents is one of the biggest torrent sites around; Alexa ranks it as the 68th most popular website in the world. It has undergone several domain name changes in its history, most notably in 2011, after the U.S. Department of Justice went after major torrent sites, including Demonoid and Torrentz.
The news comes shortly after another popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay, came back online after nearly a month of downtime following a police raid on the site's servers.
It is unclear whether the seizure of the Kickass domain name is part of a coordinated anti-piracy action or is in any way related to The Pirate Bay's woes.