For most people TPB is just a site where they can download torrents, but in reality it is more than that. The Pirate Bay tracker is responsible for more than half of all BitTorrent traffic, even for torrents that are downloaded off Mininova or isoHunt.

This means that, when The Pirate Bay goes down, many torrents will slow down or stop working entirely. That is, if there is no backup tracker listed in the torrent. One widely used backup tracker is PublicBitTorrent, a standalone tracker running on OpenTracker software.

As becomes clear from the graph below, the Pirate Bay downtime didn’t go unnoticed for long. As soon as TPB’s tracker went down the number of peers using the PublicBT tracker skyrocketed.

One of the admins told FreakBits that they are currently tracking well over 2.5 million peers, a record since the tracker launched last month. And with the upcoming sale of TPB this figure might go up even further in the near future. Let’s hope it holds up.

Article from: FreakBits