Blockade TPB by Cogent was the result of a court order against another site

The blockade of The Pirate Bay and other similar sites by backbone provider Cogent was the result of a court order against another undisclosed site. Cloudflare has since moved the unjustly blocked sites to new IP addresses.

The site targeted by the injunction used the same two Cloudflare IP addresses as The Pirate Bay and other sites, TorrentFreak said. To comply with the order, provider Cogent had blocked all traffic to the IP addresses. As a result, the other sites were also unreachable for a while. Due to the move by Cloudflare, they are now accessible again.

A Cloudflare spokesperson told TorrentFreak, “It’s important for courts to understand how the internet works so they can issue warrants that don’t have unintended consequences.” He adds that it can sometimes be difficult to work with judges: “It can often be difficult, especially when courts are addressing an injunction to backbone providers without understanding how they work.”

Ars Technica reports that the court order comes from Spain. An expert told the site that these types of orders are usually directed against ISPs that deliver directly to consumers, not backbone providers. In a statement, Cogent told the site that “a customer chooses to assign different parties shared IP addresses” and that it cannot check in advance which sites may be affected by a block.