of file hosting site rapidshare shut down?

Rapidshare.com Down: RapidShare Rumored To Have Been Shut Down: There are rumors that Rapidshare.com, the file sharing website, has been shut down by the authorities after a court order. Many websites have pointed to this report at GEMA, the German collections agency, indicating that RapidShare has been ordered to be shut down due to copyright infringements. However, the report was dated 19th January 2007.



RapidShare, which allegedly went down around 0200 GMT on the 19th January, is back up again. The site has also issued a statement explaining the down time,

Unfortunately, starting at 5 pm CET, one of our carriers experienced a severe technical problem with their hardware, causing a loss of 50 gigabit of bandwidth. Therefore RapidShare was unavailable for several hours. We already have taken steps to avoid this particular problem in the future.

According to Download 4 All, Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on the rumours:

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)

Other links:
- Popular file hosting website Rapidshare Shut Down?
- Rapidshare Down
- File hosting site RapidShare shut down?
- RapidShare Wikipedia
- RapidShare.com shut down?

Links regarding the old report:
- GEMA obtains injunctions against data exchange services
- Rapidshare wins over german collecting society GEMA