The private music torrent tracker What.cd went offline a few hours ago, as a police raid on the servers the site uses in France has been reported.
A message posted on the tracker reports that the website is shutting down, although there is no confirmation that any raid by the police was carried out.
“Due to certain recent events, the operation of What.cd is being terminated. We will not return soon. All the site’s data and our users have been destroyed.” the announcement states.
The message implies that the shutdown of the website could be permanent, but it also provides assurances that all the data were destroyed before the police gained access to the servers.
Citing French media, TorrentFreak reports that the French authorities raided a total of 12 OVH servers. No arrests were made as far as can be seen, and it is still unclear whether the data still exist on the servers, or have been deleted as the administrators stated in the announcement.
The cybercrime prosecution service of the Gendarmerie (C3N) confirmed the police operations, but does not list What.cd as a target. The French music industry group SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique) is reported to have worked closely with the authorities for the raid on the site.
At the moment, even the IRC channel used by the site members is offline. It should be noted that What.cd was one of the largest private trackers. The site administrators announced that the site had a million unique music releases.
The community grew at a very rapid pace since 2007, mainly due to the shutdown of the large oink.
