The website owners on Wednesday posted a goodbye message on the site’s front page and bid farewell to millions of its monthly visitors from all over the world. The team cited various reasons for the shutdown, including the death of some staff due to COVID-19 or COVID-related health problems, the rising cost of operations, financial difficulties, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine that had members fighting on both sides. The full shutdown statement released by the site reads as follows: Hello guys, We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site. The past 2 years have been very difficult for us – some of the people in our team died due to covid complications, others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all. Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES. Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard. Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare. Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket. After an unanimous vote we’ve decided that we can no longer do it. We are sorry 🙁 Bye Other domains that used to direct to RABRG are also displaying the above message, indicating that the shutdown was well-planned. ABOUT RARBG Founded in 2008, RARBG was originally conceived as a Bulgarian BitTorrent tracker, which later went on to serve an international audience and specialized in English-language high-quality video releases. The site was created for the purpose of downloading new movies, music, series, games, and TV show releases. Owing to legal compliance, especially due to its facilitation of copyright infringement, RARBG was blocked in many countries by their respective governments, including Australia, the UK, the US, UAE, Canada, India, and more. The torrent website was first blocked in 2008 due to copyright infringement. In 2017, Google also removed it from its search results following a controversy wherein links to torrent sites were highlighted in Google’s “carousel” search results. Which made its users use VPN and RARBG Proxy to unblock the site. Further, in 2019, the website was described as a “notorious market” by the U.S. trade representative. Later, in 2020, the website was listed as a target of Bulgarian law enforcement. According to the website analytics tool Similarweb, RARBG.to received more than 40 million visitors in April 2023. The abrupt shutdown of RARBG has caught million of its users by surprise. With the shutdown, we may soon see the emergence of many copycats of RARBG fighting to take its place. However, the truth remains that the original RARBG is dead. RIP!!!
