Yesterday, sad news sent shockwaves through the torrent world. RARBG shutdown. Yes, one of the internet’s most popular torrent sites has officially shut down. The RARBG shutdown was announced in a farewell message to millions of users worldwide. Staff losses from COVID-19 and team members active in the tensions in Ukraine were among the reasons for the RARBG shutdown.
Reasons behind the RARBG Shutdown
After 15 years online as one of the best torrent sites to download movies, TV series, music, games, and software, the site has shut down, leaving a big hole in the torrent community. The unexpected news was initially broken by the website TorrentFreak. They added someone familiar with RARBG and confirmed the closure. This came as a major surprise to everyone who used the site and enjoyed the content.
RARBG began in Bulgaria in 2008 as a Bulgarian BitTorrent tracker. But it soon gained popularity around the world. However, its huge popularity also became a curse for the website. Because the site actively engaged in copyright concerns, many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada, and India, issued lawsuits against it and banned it. In 2017, Google removed it from the search engine results page.
Still, regular users visited the RARBG website by directly entering the URL in the browser or by using VPNs. Moreover, many users also unblocked the site using RARBG proxy and mirror sites. To say goodbye to their users, the RARBG crew posted a message on their website. They claimed that they had to close the site due to a number of serious issues. Some of their teammates became quite ill as a result of COVID-19, and some died.
Moreover, they also mentioned how the war in Ukraine affected their team. Furthermore, due to growing costs and inflation, the expense of maintaining the site became expensive. The impact of the RARBG shutdown goes beyond its user base. It also reduces the availability of pirated content on other platforms, making it more difficult to find elsewhere.
The site’s official closing statement reads as follows:
“Hello guys, We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site.
The past 2 years have been very difficult for us – some of the people in our team died due to COVID complications, others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all.
Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES.
Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard.
Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bear. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After a unanimous vote, we’ve decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry :(“
Even though RARBG is no longer available, you can still access the site through RARBG alternatives. Yes, you heard it right! There are many RARBG proxy unblock sites that let you access the content of RARBG even if the main site is blocked in your country. These proxy sites act like duplicates or mirrors of the original RARBG site, so you can download movies and TV shows just like you used to.
