Popular public torrent index and BitTorrent tracker h33t (www.h33t.com) has been down since 31st January 2008. Both the site and it’s BitTorrent tracker is offline and the exact reason for the downtime is not known. H33T is an extremely popular BitTorrent site with a large community of users and the lack of news regarding the downtime is a little surprising.
I tried accessing the official forums located at http://h33tfr33sp33k.h33t.com/ but they seem to be down too. As far as I know, they did not have an IRC channel either (correct me if I am wrong). A somewhat worrying factor is that h33t was hosted in the Netherlands, the country where BREIN is based on. BREIN is an anti piracy outfit that has caused some trouble for torrent trackers hosted in the Netherlands in the recent past. There has however been no news of H33T getting shut down due to any legal pressure. The unexpected downtime may well be the result of a hardware failure, an issue with the hosting provider or something similar and less serious than legal pressure.
Whatever the cause of the downtime is, let’s hope it’s only temporary as H33T was/is one of the best public trackers with less fakes, lots of applications (including All-in-one packs), comics and other rare content not easily found elsewhere. When/if the site comes back online, we will post an updated article so keep checking the homepage.
