Kickass Torrents, the popular online platform for downloading torrents online, has sprung back to life. After going down in July 2016 following founder Artem Vaulin’s arrest, Kickass Torrents has been reinstated by some of its ex-staffers.
The second half of 2016 has seen rampant takedown of torrent websites, with Kickass Torrents being among the most popular of the lot. The website came back to life for a brief moment soon after its demise, but it didn't survive for long on the Internet. Starting today, Kickass Torrents has a new, fully functional website, which looks similar to the older website.
A torrent site depends entirely on its uploaders and the KAT.cr team claims to have all of its uploaders onboard. Since Kickass Torrents went offline, there have been number of sites that tried to take advantage of the opportunity. Some websites even put up interfaces that were just blatant rip-offs from the original site.
With Artem Vaulin still under trial, it is unclear how long the new site will survive. Incidentally, KAT's new site seems to be completely frozen at the moment. The new homepage is broken, and community/forums are not even opening. Just now, KAT’s community issued this message stating server overload and work currently being in progress.