Police raids controversial Swedish web host, Pirate Bay site is down

The Pirate Bay’s website is unreachable and has been down for over a day now, prompting speculation that Monday’s police raid of the premises of Stockholm-based web host PeRiQuito (PRQ) might have something to do with it.

Mikael Viborg, the current owner of the controversial hosting company founded by Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, has confirmed for Nyheter24 that the Swedish police took four of its servers with them.

It is still unknown whether they were aiming to take down The Pirate Bay or any of the other questionable sites hosted on PRQ’s servers – file-sharing sites, Pedophile.se, the North America Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), WikiLeaks, and others.

In the meantime, The Pirate Bay operators took to the site’s Facebook page to allay its users’ fears and confirm that they have not been raided and that they are not shutting down.

They acknowledged the news of the PRQ raid but claim that they only have a relay with the company.

“This combined with a power failure at another place is the reason why we’re down at the moment. The raid mentioned below is not aimed at us,” they explained earlier in the day. “Expect us to be back with full force, hopefully later today.”

Viborg confirmed that the company has had no direct connection with TPB since 2010.

After being down since the raid, PRQ’s website and a number of streaming sites are back online, but most of the file-sharing sites are not, TorrentFreak reports.

It could be that Viborg’s speculation about the investigation and the raid being tied to intellectual property violations might be correct after all.