Extended Outage for Torrent Hub LokiTorrent

The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent has been offline for an extended period today. LokiTorrent, which is among the sites facing lawsuits over the use of BitTorrent in illegal file sharing, recently was listed for sale on the domain auction site Sedo. The site has more than 680,000 registered members, and in recent weeks has been averaging 185,000 visitors per day

A dynamically upgrading chart of www.lokitorrent.com is available here.

LokiTorrent is among the most visible portals supporting BitTorrent, the popular distributed file-serving technology developed by Bram Cohen. Two other torrent hubs, SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org shut down in December, shortly after the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) began filing lawsuits against sites supporting BitTorrent. LokiTorrent announced that it would fight the MPAA lawsuit, and raised more than $25,000 in user donations prior to seeking sale offers.

BitTorrent breaks large files into smaller chunks ("torrents") and allows users to simultaneously upload and download them to more efficiently share large files. The open source BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and P2P service provider CacheLogic has estimated that torrent-related traffic accounted for more than 30 percent of all Internet traffic in the first half of 2004.