14 DAY TRIAL // Popular and highly efficient (pirated) movie release group YTS (formerly YIFY) has officially called it quits, as sources from inside the organization have told TorrentFreak, a blog specialized on the piracy and torrents scene.
The group, which launched in 2010, was initially named YIFY but rebranded into YTS in 2014, after its founder retired.
In the past five years, YIFY has managed to reach cult status in the torrents release scene, being always one of the first pirating group that provided high-quality releases, all on a regular basis, without huge gaps between releases.
The group created its own website a few years back, which became so popular that it managed to reach the Alexa Top 600, garnering over 1 million visitors and having over 4 million page views each month.
Despite the trouble it caused Hollywood film studies, the group seemed to be untouchable and continued to release movies all these years.
YTS website went down 2 weeks ago, never came back online
The first problems arose two weeks ago, when, according to rumors, a massive DDoS attack was launched against its yts.to website.
Since then, the site has been down all this time, causing all kinds of problems to some of the Popcorn Time clones that worked on top of its infrastructure.
According to TorrentFreak, which cites internal YTS sources, the group has decided to shut down its operations.
TorrentFreak says they were told the real reason behind the YTS decision, but the group did not want it disclosed, just yet.
In the past two weeks, MPAA and RIAA have managed to put legal pressure on Aurous, a Popcorn Time-like application for (illegally) streaming music, and BrowserPopcorn, a version of Popcorn Time that ran inside a browser, forcing both to shut down.
Piracy is going through a bad phase right now. That or copyright protection groups have found a novel way of going after piracy groups of which we aren't aware just yet.