Is Kat.ph Down? Torrent Sites May Have Been Knocked Offline By Domain Difficulty

The official Twitter feed for Kat.ph mentioned the site would be down for “45-90 minutes” Friday but became so inundated with questions over the next 48 hours that it responded with “Kat.ph will get back online soon.”

The message encouraged users to download files from KickAss Torrents, the domain formerly used by Kat.ph, during the interim. That message came around 11 a.m. EST Sunday.

TorrentFreak speculated that the site was down because of an expired domain name, although that offered little solace for people hoping to download movies and music. Kat.ph provides links to Internet pirates hoping to obtain content for free, albeit illegally. Site administrators told TorrentFreak, “Technical issues. Should be solved soon.”

KickAss Torrents ranked at No. 2 on TorrentFreak’s list of most popular torrent websites online earlier this year.

Another useful resource when investigating if sites are experiencing outages is IsItDownrightNow.com, which offers up-to-the-minute updates about which pages (legal and illegal) have been experiencing technical difficulty.

While Kat.ph has been a target of entertainment lobby groups and the U.S. Department of Justice, it’s more likely the outage came as a result of difficulties outside the legal sphere.