Pirate Bay Back Online Weeks After Being Shut Down by Swedish Police

MOSCOW, January 31 (Sputnik), Ekaterina Blinova – The Pirate Bay has risen from the ashes after it was shut down by Swedish police seven weeks ago.

"A phoenix has replaced the iconic pirate ship atop The Pirate Bay today, celebrating the site's rise from the ashes," The Verge reported.

The server room in Stockholm belonging to the notorious torrent site was raided about seven weeks ago by Swedish police leaving the future of the site in doubt.

Fredrik Neij, one of the co-founders of the torrent site was captured by police in November 2014 at the Laos-Thailand border. He was charged by Swedish authorities with sharing copyrighted material more than five years ago but fled the country. Another of the site's co-founders Peter Sunde was arrested earlier in 2014, while Gottfrid Svartholm is facing a 3.5-year jail term for hacking a US company.

The Pirate Bay came under attack from both international agencies and Silicon Valley giants. UK, Dutch and French courts officially banned access to the notorious site while Google blocked all third-party apps from connecting to the portal from its Google Play store.

However, according to the Verge, The Pirate Bay "has proven to be incredibly resilient." Although it remains a mystery how the site has returned online, it is known that The Pirate Bay torrent is currently running on multiple "virtual" servers hosted by cloud storage companies around the world. Since the physical servers are located on different distant sites, there is "no real way to shut down [The Pirate Bay] for good," the Verge points out.

But one question remains: with the original founders all out of the picture, who is actually behind the "new" Pirate Bay?