In 2011, BitTorrent accounted for nearly 23 percent of all daily traffic in North America, according to Sandvine. That resilience to individual site outages does belie the general trend of BitTorrent traffic, though, which is sharply downward. (Although please don't click random Google links promising first-run movies you're basically begging for malware). Torrentz may have been a search engine for pirated content-but so is Google. It’s not really a factor,” says Deeth, who points to repeated closures of popular site The Pirate Bay in years past, none of which noticeably affected the rate of piracy. “There isn’t a big traffic swing when sites like that go down. If history is any guide, the closure of two major sites in two weeks won’t put a dent in piracy. In fact, just a few hours after Torrentz’s closure, torrent fans were already comparing notes on potential replacements on sites like Reddit. So what happened? WIRED's attempts to reach Torrentz's operator, who goes by the handle “Flippy” on the site, have been so far unsuccessful, though he (or she! it's unclear) did reportedly tell torrent-tracking site TorrentFreak that he would not be commenting further. That made it a major presence not just within the torrenting community, but on the Internet at large before it shut down, it was 186 on web-ranking service Alexa, putting it ahead of sites like and Flickr. And if you're not familiar with torrenting, it's a file-sharing technique that spreads data across multiple computers and is often used for piracy, but not always! Torrentz didn’t host files itself it instead acted as a search engine, directing people to sites (like KAT) hat facilitated actual peer-to-peer sharing of pirated content. If you’re not familiar with Torrentz, it’s easiest to think of it as the Google of the torrenting world.

Two of the largest sites in piracy have blinked out-but that won’t speed piracy’s steady decline. This week, Torrentz, the world’s largest torrent search engine, closed without notice or explanation. Two weeks ago, federal authorities seized and shuttered KickassTorrents (KAT), the world’s largest torrenting site.

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