Rapidshare.com the popular file hoster is currently unreachable if you use the url. Rumors began to spread like wildfire claiming that Rapidshare servers were taken down by court order, that the police seized Rapidshare servers which was the reason for the unavailability.
These rumors are most likely false. You can still reach Rapidshare.com if you use a Rapidshare IP like 80.239.151.250 instead. The connection is rather slow at the moment and a Rapidshare technican (unconfirmed though) posted a message saying that servers would be back online around midnight GMT.
We will see if the outage is really hardware related or does have other reasons. It is in my opinion unlikely that the police will raid servers on a Saturday instead of a weekday. Still it could be possible. Here is the message posted at the Round Views website.
As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare’s servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue – “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”
My personal opinion is that I would not worry to much and wait to see if the problems are fixed at midnight or in the following hours.
Update: Rapidshare up again !
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yup their up again.
Maybe they done some server cleaning or what have you.
Why would the police or any person in authority put rapidshare down? Piracy? hmmm. I know that there are some in there but its a legit service.
They got a court suit or something, now they are back but I think the police will be on to them again soon.
I hope they close, they have been so bitchy with my rapidshare account after i close im gona tell them to fuck themselfs. I hope rapidshare closes, and megaupload beats there stupid german asses. It aint legit lol, the majority is piracy anyways;.