It’s been a bit of a nightmare week for torrent-based movie and TV streaming service Popcorn Time. After a number of the core development team had decided to leave the project due to the threat of possible legal action, additional problems started to occur with the application’s domain name, which has resulted in the main Popcorn Time fork being pulled offline permanently and being entirely inaccessible to anyone wanting to use the service.
The majority of the issues started appearing at the beginning of last week when some members of the core development team behind the service took the decision to walk away from the project under the threat of serious legal action. One of those developers happened to be the individual responsible for controlling the popcorntime.io domain name, and while the rest of the team was trying to keep the service running, other nuisance’s kept coming up.
The plan was to transfer the highly important domain name to one of the remaining Popcorn Time developers who has business links to the current owner, but for one reason or another the host isn’t playing ball.
Heading over to the cached image of popcorntime.io shows this message:
In the last few days someone has been tempering with our infrastructure, mainly our DNS service and we can’t convince our provider https://gandi.net that we are us and want to stay online. We’re doing our best to maintain the service but today we can’t give any timeline of things getting better. Please hang on, we’re working day and night to get this sorted out.
While a number of initial issues that cropped up during the week appeared to have been resolved, Gandi has subsequently refused to transfer the domain name, once again resulting in popcorntime.io going offline. Now, due to the massive escalation of issues, popcorntime.io developer Wally has taken the decision to close the main fork’s servers and infrastructure, which has ultimately resulted in the demise of the most widely-used Popcorn Time variant. Outlining his position on this development, Wally had this to say:
I shutdown all the servers, there is nothing I can do anymore. I deleted any logs that can be harmful for any other dev.
Of course, a number of variants of the service are still up and running, but with the most popular version all burnt out, then in all likelihood the smaller offerings may follow sooner rather than later.
(Via: TorrentFreak)
You may also like to check out:
- Movie Makers File Lawsuit Against Popcorn Time Users In The U.S.
- Popcorn Time Gets Blocked In The UK By Court
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