Multiupload

» see multiupload.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

For years the address served somebody else's default page. Anyone who typed multiupload.com between 2006 and early 2008 got a Confixx control panel placeholder announcing, in German, that the web pages of user web11 on argon174.server4you.de were being set up. A file-sharing service that would eventually carry firmware images to half the Android modding scene spent its first years as an unused account on a German shared host.

By the summer of 2009 the same address was running the thing it is remembered for. You picked a file once, and Multiupload pushed it to several cyberlockers in parallel, then gave you back one page listing every copy. If a host was down or had deleted the file, the row underneath still worked. It could also fetch from a URL instead of your disk, and it took Rapidshare and Megaupload links as sources, which meant it could rescue a dying link by mirroring it before it expired.

That made it infrastructure for a specific kind of posting. A forum thread carrying a custom ROM or a rescue disc did not link a host, it linked a Multiupload page, because the host was the component that kept failing. Individual cyberlockers deleted files for inactivity or vanished entirely, and the mirror row was the only durable thing anybody could paste into a post that would still be read in eight months.

I was never the person posting the file. Multiupload was a tool for uploaders, and its whole value appeared at the moment you had something to distribute and wanted it to outlive any single host. If you were only ever on the receiving end, it was a page of identical links you picked one from and forgot about immediately. That is where I sat, which is why the name meant considerably less to me than the hosts it was mirroring to.

~ the dossier ~

~ what one link replaced ~

The problem it solved was a posting convention that had gotten out of hand. By 2010 a well-made forum post included the same file uploaded manually to four or five hosts, each with its own account and its own captcha, because the poster knew from experience that any one of them would be gone by the time somebody needed it. That was twenty minutes of clicking per release, repeated by every person who shared anything.

Multiupload turned that into one form and one progress bar. It was not a host itself in any meaningful sense, which is the detail that mattered later: it held nothing, it just distributed. The business underneath was affiliate revenue from the cyberlockers, who paid for uploads and downloads, so a service that made mirroring frictionless was making money from an industry that paid by the gigabyte.

~ the week after the raid ~

On 19 January 2012 the United States Department of Justice seized Megaupload and arrested its operators in New Zealand. Multiupload was not named in the indictment and its domain was not taken, but the effect landed anyway, because Megaupload had been one of the destinations in every mirror row and it was suddenly a seizure notice.

The rest of the industry then removed itself. FileSonic and FileServe disabled third-party downloading within days, so files uploaded by one person could no longer be fetched by anybody else, which turns a cyberlocker into private storage and makes a mirror service pointless. Wupload followed FileServe out of the business entirely by April. A tool whose entire function was distributing across other people's hosts had spent five weeks watching those hosts either close or stop allowing the thing it did.

~ closed by its owner ~

There was no statement and no press coverage. The last working capture of the front page is 9 February 2012. By 24 February webmaster forums were passing around the same short conclusion, that Multiupload was down for good and had been closed by whoever ran it, with the thread immediately turning into a list of replacements. Nobody in those threads knew the operator's name, and no source has published it since.

The read at the time was that this was voluntary and precautionary rather than forced. The Megaupload indictment made a legal argument about knowing facilitation, and a service that existed purely to spread a single file across the maximum number of hosts was not a comfortable place to be standing while that argument was being tested. Closing it took one afternoon and cost the owner an income, which is cheaper than the alternative that had just happened to somebody else.

~ a two hundred with nothing in it ~

What the archive caught next is the part worth keeping. The capture from 18 April 2012 is not an error page and not a seizure banner. It is a successful HTTP 200 response with a body of zero bytes. The server was up and answering politely with nothing at all inside the answer, and it kept doing that through the rest of the year.

The domain is still registered and still resolves. It answers with a 404 now, which is a small step down from serving nothing successfully. Every forum post from that era that pointed at a Multiupload page is still sitting there with a dead link where a row of eight mirrors used to be, which is the exact failure the service was built to prevent, arriving one layer higher up than anyone had planned for.

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