PARIS - Movie fans filled social media with dismayed messages on Thursday after one of the most prolific websites devoted to distributing pirated films and other content announced its closure.

The team behind the 15-year-old RARBG website said in a message that they could no longer afford to operate because of rising costs and health issues.

The site was at the centre of an Internet subculture where tens of millions of people use files known as torrents to share pirated movies and TV shows as well as music and video games.

The US government’s trade office has repeatedly included RARBG in its annual list of the world’s “notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy”.

Governments in several countries had banned the site, thought to be run from Bulgaria.

Yet the team behind RARBG has so far avoided the fate of other notorious sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents, whose founders ended up serving jail time.

Visitors to the RARBG website are now met with a message bemoaning inflation and soaring electricity costs, and claiming that some of their team had died from Covid-19 and others were too sick to work.

“Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES,” the message added in an apparent reference to the war in Ukraine, leading some web users to suggest the message must be a hoax.

The secretive team has no contact details but the specialist website Torrent Freak, which called the shutdown “one of the largest in the history of torrent sites”, said a source had confirmed the site had closed for good.

Fans of the site flooded Twitter and Reddit with alarmed messages and memes.

“Never realised how much I relied on this site until now,” said a Reddit user known as Femketwitch. “I feel like I just lost a friend.”

However, many others suggested it would not be long before another site arrived to provide the same service. AFP