Rapidshare Down !!!

As of 19 January 2008, Rapidshare.com is down!! It has been one of my favourite site for downloading and uploading stuff since the invention of internet.


Some google searching found some issues around this problem:

• It has been shutdown by some anti-piracy authorities in Germany. They said that the servers have been seized from their offices in Berlin. The authorities are pursuing legal action against users who distribute and download illegal copies of movies or software applications (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare). However this issue seems just a gossip, there was a news said that Rapidshare had won a case in court against a GEMA, the German Collecting Society (source: http://soufron.typhon.net/spip.php?article177).
• A blog from http://www.roundviews.com/2008/01/19/rapidshare-down/ wrote that a technician from Rapidshare, Steven Gircham said, “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)”
• A comment from the above blog said that only the rapidshare.com is down, the servers are still accessible through http://80.239.151.250/. I have checked and that works, however it seems that the functionality is limited.

I am confused, which one is true, I will update this when I found another breaking news.

Update 1 (the same date):
Hey... it is up and running now.. I am just happy my account should be survived, rapidshare should give me time extension because of this down time. However I am still interested in finding how could this happen.

Update 2:
It is confirmed now that the problem came from their hardware. Here is the quote from http://rapidshare.com/en/news.html:
"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".