PublicHD Disappears, Twitter & Facebook Accounts Gone

[TRACKERFANCLUB]

One of the Internet's favorite public torrent sites for HD content has mysteriously disappeared. Sites can often suffer downtime, but the complete absence of PublicHD since yesterday is also accompanied by the deletion of its Twitter and Facebook accounts.

While new file-sharing sites appear on a regular basis, it’s reasonably rare for fresh torrent sites to fill a niche in an effective and public fashion. PublicHD was a site that bucked that trend, in part by delivering focused content rather than simply making existing material searchable.

From a standing start, during the last quarter of 2012 PublicHD’s popularity skyrocketed. Concentrating on movie rips at the higher end of the quality spectrum, PublicHD grew steadily throughout 2013, a trend that continued – blips aside – into the first few months of this year.

Then yesterday, without warning, PublicHD simply disappeared and into today the site is still inaccessible via its main Swedish domain, .EU alternative, or official proxy. There has been no official announcement or explanation. Needless to say, currently there are plenty of worried users.

Of course, sites go offline for technical reasons all the time, and it may yet transpire that PublicHD has had some serious technical issues. The signs, however, are less than encouraging. The first logical places for users to check for status updates are PublicHD’s Twitter and Facebook accounts but just like the main site, they have completely disappeared.

Since PublicHD is, as its name suggests, a public site, its activities can be seen not only on its own domain but on other torrent sites too. For example, The Pirate Bay has a user account by the name of DibyaTPB, which is believed to be a PublicHD auto-uploading bot. After making hundreds of releases and rarely if ever having a break, yesterday DibyaTPB fell silent, indicating that the site is indeed completely offline.

Furthermore, BOZX, another Pirate Bay account associated with PublicHD, also went quiet on Saturday. And, after 19,199 uploads, the corresponding account for BOZX on KickassTorrents was silenced too. At some point, it’s not clear when, the account was also renamed.

The disappearance of PublicHD is even more puzzling given that earlier this month the site’s operators were planning new and bigger things.

“Soon we are a going to have a makeover and a brand new PublicHD with tons of new features and stronger security system,†they said in an announcement.

It’s certainly feasible that the upgrades are underway now, but why that would go hand in hand with PublicHD’s decision to disappear themselves from social media thus keeping their users entirely in the dark makes little sense.

Rightsholders have issued a steady stream of complaints against PublicHD to Google since late 2012 but since the start of 2014 the number being processed has steadily increased, with April and May being the most active months in the site’s history.