Popular Torrent Site, RARBG Closes its Doors in the Face of Difficulties and Legal Challenges

It has just been reported that RARBG will be ceasing operations with immediate effect due to financial, legal and health difficulties.

After an unanimous vote we’ve decided that we can no longer do it. We are sorry. Bye

RARBG

RARBG launched in 2007 as a Bulgarian domain, but quickly moved to English content that gained it a lot of international audience, and it quickly became one of the most popular torrent sites for downloading pirated movies and TV shows.

We’ve seen how, with time, torrenting has gotten more popular than ever, but authorities have remained vigilant, and have been seizing more and more torrent sites over time. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the rise of subscription based streaming services have surely put a dent in the popularity of these torrent sites, making them difficult to sustain.

RARBG was no exception to this, as after its launch, it was quickly flagged for copyright infringement a year later, in 2008. Almost nine years later, in 2017, Google also removed it from its search results. This is around the same time that illegal torrenting was being taken seriously, and in 2018, the popular torrent client, uTorrent was flagged by Microsoft as malware.

There were some workarounds to this, as by this time, these websites had gained a lot of loyal user base, but the authorities didn’t back down, and legal challenges mounted. As it this wasn’t enough, inflation led to the rising costs of operating data centers and made it difficult to sustain.

Here’s what you see when you try to visit RARBG’s website now:

As you can see from the message above, it wasn’t simply the financial and legal concerns that impacted the team, rather COVID and the Ukraine war also factors that ultimately forced them to shut down this iconic website.

To give you an idea of how popular this site is, remember that it was in the top 1,000 most visited websites in the world last month, getting over 40 million visits in May alone.

Even so, the website will be remembered by millions of people around the world, and the fact that it wasn’t just the illegal torrenting that caused it to close makes it even sadder. This is all we know for now but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.