It would appear torrent sites are being hammered by DDoS attacks and the reason is related to their banning of .’unofficial’ proxy services.

ExtraTorrent faced tons of cyberattacks over the last three days. Most of them were DDOS attacks. Cloudflare couldn’t help because we get 40 to 50 million requests from the US every hour.

The site temporarily limited several functions to save resources including login functionality so there were no fresh torrents. In addition, the site’s operators have removed the added protection against unofficial mirror and proxy sites.

It is believed that the added protection layer may be the reason why the site is under attack. A few days ago ExtraTorrent received an email threatening attacks, if its operators didn’t remove the encryption within 24 hours.

Blocking out “unofficial” proxy sites is a pain in the arse for many users who might be paying for a proxy so that they don not get caught by Big Content downloading material. However the site registered the proxy site as being unofficial because it is not a big name or registered.

The Pirate Bay is also down at the time of writing. Users who try to access the site get a CloudFlare downtime warning, or a new Captcha error.