Pirate Movie Streaming Giant FMovies Has Gone Offline for Over a Day

• Pirate movie streaming website FMovies went offline on July 16 without any prior notice.
• Its operators haven’t been adding new content lately, and legal issues have been hovering since its launch.
• The Cloudflare error that the pirate website displayed is quite common if isolated, though.

FMovies, one of the pirate sites with the most visits in the world, has been unreachable since yesterday without any explanation or notice. After 8 years of seemingly undeterred operation, its operators stopped uploading new content earlier this month, and some believe the illegal movie streaming platform may have reached its end of life.

The domain became unreachable on July 16 and stayed like that for more than a day, displaying a connection timeout error instead of the regular homepage. TorrentFreak heard through an indirect source that the pirate website faces “legal issues.”

The Fmovies website does not show any immediate domain name problems, and temporary downtime is not uncommon, but these aspects, coupled with the apparent inactivity as of late, lead some to suspect its owners abandoned Fmovies.

Fmovies first appeared on the scene in 2016, gaining revenue through advertisements. Just months after its launch, it was hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit in a U.S. Court. The site’s owners ignored the $210,000 damages award and continued to offer illegal free titles.

In the past few years, rightsholder representatives such as the Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA) and others have deployed intense efforts to keep the pressure on. They managed to pinpoint the site’s operators in Vietnam and teamed up with local authorities to solve the issue. 

Several organizations have also flagged the pirate website to U.S. authorities and lawmakers.