bigOfeature

GAME OF THRONES TRAFFIC SURGE SLOWED DOWN THE PIRATE BAY

TO DONATE TO BigO, USE SKRILL

As of now, we have stopped all restarts of older shows to reduce the cost of running the site. Readers who can donate towards the cost of the site, please open a Skrill account.

If you can afford to donate, please open a Skrill account. We don’t use much but we can’t run on empty.

Readers who wish to contribute to BigO will now have to use Skrill (click here). We are no longer able to use PayPal to receive donations. Register an account at Skrill. To make a payment, use this e-mail address as recipient’s e-mail address in Skrill. Looking forward to hearing from you.

+ + + + +

JUST TO LET YOU KNOW
To reduce spamming, the BigO website is going through Cloudflare. What it does is scan your browser to ensure the visitor is not a spam. Do not be alarmed as this usually takes only a few seconds. Email us if you still have difficulty accessing the BigO site; or playing or downloading the tracks. If you know a better way of reducing spam, do let us know.

+ + + + +

Game Of Thrones proved once again that sharing freely won’t hamper a quality show. While back in the “USSR”, a private, members-only site, shuttered. By Ernesto of TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay suffered some downtime August 30, welcoming users with a Cloudflare error message, which is nothing new really. But earlier this week the site was hard to reach for a more unusual reason; the Game Of Thrones season finale overloaded the torrent site with visitors. The Pirate Bay was unreachable for several hours on August 30, after it already experienced connectivity issues on Monday and Tuesday.

Downtime on August 30 was due to a DDoS attack, we were informed and, at the time of writing, the site is working fine again. What’s interesting, though, is that the site’s connectivity issues earlier this week were triggered by something more unusual. A massive increase in “Game Of Thrones” traffic. Yesterday, the TPB-team said traffic to the site quadrupled on August 28 after the season finale was uploaded. A 400 per cent increase means millions of extra visitors, something that can easily grind a site down to a halt.

The Pirate Bay is capable of handling some traffic peaks, we were told, but the Game Of Thrones surge was hard to manage. The spike in visitors is not unique to The Pirate Bay website. It affected other torrent sites too, especially after The Pirate Bay became unreachable in some parts of the world. One torrent site owner found the traffic surge so unprecedented and sudden, that it almost seemed like a DDoS attack.

The problems are not limited to torrent sites alone. Plenty of legal streaming platforms had trouble keeping up with the Game Of Thrones demand as well. For example, a lot of HBO Go users complained that they couldn’t access the service when the season finale aired.

Finally, to illustrate how Game Of Thrones traffic is dominating torrents sites we only have to look at the most shared files on The Pirate Bay. Currently, top seven are all GoT related. Now that Game Of Thrones has come to an end, for this season at least, things are likely to calm down a bit.

TPB’s most shared torrents:

+ + + + +

Note: Visit TorrentFreak.com for more updates.