It has been many days since a popular, semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid has remained offline. The employees working for this website are also clueless about what’s happening and claim that the owner of Demonoid, Deimos, is also missing. None of them have had any contact with him for the past two months.
Demonoid has been the hub of a number of file-sharing related discussion forums and could be termed as one of the oldest torrent forums on the internet. Over the years, the website has gone through many rough patches ranging from lawsuits, media pressures, and blocking orders to police investigations, and hosting problems.
However, the website has been down for several weeks and even months previously as well and then was back online like nothing happened. So, it is yet to be seen if the same thing happens this time or would be a different picture.
We cannot ignore the fact that Demonoid has already been facing technical issues that take much longer to be fixed than expected. Such as the sub-site of Demonoid, Hypercache.pw is also offline currently, which has further complicated the situation.
Demonoid has a habit of going offline for weeks without any warning or notice so it has been nicknamed as the Comeback Kid. The site has been having issues since August as all the torrents uploaded on the site disappeared mysteriously and then came back surprisingly.
According to one of the workers at Demonoids, Phaze1G, there is no clarity over what’s going on. The domain names are working just fine but Hypercache.pw’s offline status is something unusual. “There’s nothing new, unfortunately,” Phaze1G told TorrentFreak.
Phaze1G said that the staffers are waiting in a small chat box and searching for some positive signs to remain hopeful about the future of Demonoid. As of now, they are in the dark completely and the forums have gone silent apart from some activity on the official Reddit forums. The staff members highlighted that no alternative like a proxy server is available for Demonoid and those available on the internet are fake.
“We don’t know why Deimos is not on Demonoid, but if I have to guess those are real-life issues and Demonoid at this moment is not a priority. I really hope that he will return in next 1-2 months and keep this place up and running like he did last year (we actually had only 2 minor downtimes for an entire year)” wrote Phaze1G.
Phaze1G’s post on Reddit
He also clarified that Deimos would avoid legal issues as much as possible if something happens because he isn’t the kind of person to leave such a well-established website for no reason.
“In his vision, Demonoid is a place which helps the world to be just a tiny bit of a better place. For example, when a user had cancer and needed money for a surgery, the Demonoid and its members helped to pay the bills,” explains Phaze1G.
It is believed that Deimos is caught into some personal problems but even the employees aren’t sure what sort of circumstances he is facing. Technical issues might have caused the website to remain down but it is a concerning fact that the owner has also vanished. Could it be the continuation of the process of rendering torrents where pirated content is shared as illegal and blocking them from public access? It isn’t clear yet.
