YggTorrent

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

~ the last words ~

t411 was raided and closed on 26 June 2017, and within a week the largest French-speaking torrent audience on the internet had nowhere to go. A domain called yggtorrent.com had been registered on 21 May that year and was already serving a thin public directory. Its operators rebuilt it in a hurry, and by early July it was a working tracker with the t411 crowd pouring into it. Ygg, as it later shortened itself, inherited an audience rather than building one.

It grew faster than anything in its category should have. By 8 December 2017 it claimed more than 600,000 members and 173,000 torrents. On 1 January 2020 Alexa put it 35th among all websites visited in France, a position normally occupied by banks and newspapers. By May 2024 the member count was past six million, and in February 2025 the index held more than 880,000 torrents.

The French state spent most of that time trying to switch it off. Google delisted it from search on 1 December 2017 after repeated DMCA complaints. A Paris court ordered ISPs to block its domains on 17 October 2019. Arcom, the French audiovisual regulator, added "yggtorrent" to its public list of infringing services on 26 April 2023, renewed the listing on 13 November 2024, and told French sites not to publish the address at all. None of it worked. The thing that did work started inside the site.

~ the record ~

~ the address problem ~

Ygg spent its whole life moving. yggtorrent.com was abandoned for .pe on 24 September 2019. The .ws address followed on 2 December that year, and .do on 20 March 2023, with a long tail of mirrors in between. On 5 February 2020 a registrar deactivated the domain outright for intellectual property violations, and on 20 February Twitter suspended the site's account, which sent it to Mastodon. A tracker whose address changes every eighteen months has to teach its users to find it again, over and over, and Ygg got very good at that.

French Wikipedia will not even print the URL. The infobox carries a comment in place of the address explaining that ALPA, the French anti-piracy body, asked for its removal and that the editors held a discussion and agreed. An encyclopedia article about a website, with the website redacted.

~ turbo ~

On 17 May 2024 Ygg closed registration and went fully private, shortening its name in the logo and in the URL at the same time. The stated hope was that a members-only site processing takedown notices would attract less legal attention. Then on 22 December 2025 the administrators introduced a paid subscription called Turbo at 14.99 euros a month. Subscribers were exempt from the ratio rules; free accounts were put under much heavier download limits.

The reaction was immediate and it came from inside. Users and several uploader teams accused the operators of turning a community into a business and of moderating the complaints away rather than answering them. A 2018 interview with a former moderator had already put a number on the money: around 300,000 euros in four months, in donations, at a point when the site held fewer than 280,000 torrents. Turbo made that old argument concrete for everybody who had been giving.

Nothing about Ygg pointed in my direction. French-language releases were not what anybody around me wanted, and the ratio accounting on a private tracker is a commitment I have never been willing to make. What is familiar from here is the other half: in Turkey, editing your DNS settings to reach a blocked site has been ordinary household knowledge for years, for entirely different content and under an entirely different law. The muscle for chasing a site that keeps moving is the same muscle.

~ the night of 3 march ~

During the night of 3 to 4 March 2026, somebody using the name Gr0lum claimed an intrusion into Ygg's infrastructure. By his account several servers and databases were deleted or made unreachable. Reports at the time put the exposure at 6.6 million accounts and said the cryptocurrency wallet the operators used to pay for servers had been emptied as well.

Ygg went offline a few hours later, on 4 March, and the operators said the closure was permanent. The torrent catalog itself survived: somebody had a copy and published it on a separate site. Eight years of French uploads survived as a file list on somebody else's host, with no tracker left to seed from.

~ already defunct ~

On 2 July 2026 the Gendarmerie nationale announced that it had dismantled the organization behind the site. Twelve people were arrested by the UNCyber unit of the Montpellier research section, under the direction of the Paris JIRS and JUNALCO, on suspicion of organized copyright infringement and money laundering. The press release made clear that some of those arrests dated back to late 2023. Seizures came to 45,000 euros in crypto assets and computer equipment, against rights-holder losses the investigators estimated in the tens of millions. TorrentFreak put it in the headline: French police dismantle operation behind the already defunct YggTorrent.

A countdown then appeared at yggtorrent.to promising a return at midnight Paris time on 1 September 2026. When it hit zero, visitors were forwarded to an unrelated video chat service. Today yggtorrent.top serves a site called MonkeyTorrent under its own branding. The name still pulls enough French traffic to be worth stealing, which is the only kind of afterlife a tracker gets.

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