Torrent site The Pirate Bay is still going up and down. However, it is unclear if the downtime is caused by the recent taking down of its different domains.

Last week, the Stockholm District Court in Sweden ordered the authorities to take down the piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se domains in an effort to continuously crack down on the elusive torrent download site. However, The Pirate Bay proceeded to make a clever switch of its own prior to the crackdown — it utilized an automatic redirect to most of the site's still surviving domains. 

In addition, as part of the popular file sharing site's new security protocols, its partner CloudFlare has adapted what it calls an "Always Online" technology wherein users can still surf the downed site using caches. CloudFlare automatically switches it for the live version as soon as the current site goes up again.  

However, users who tried to access The Pirate Bay this week seem to have encountered more and more Error 522 screens. The error seems to be on The Pirate Bay's end, particularly CloudFlare's, as torrent downloaders saw the error message across all domains of the site. 

One workaround that some torrent users tried is accessing the site through other means such as the Tor network and the Pirate browser. Tor's network segregates content through a different server and not through CloudFlare's own network. This might signal the downtime on the main TPB sites as being caused by CloudFlare's systems. 

It is still unclear when the popular torrent site will become stable, but with the continuous crackdown even culminating in authorities raiding network server sites last year, the fate of The Pirate Bay still hangs in the balance.