If you were disheartened that your favourite pirate movie streaming site was shut down abruptly, here's something to cheer you up.
123Movies has served hundreds of thousands of users with its simple pirate movie streaming service, but the site went dark over the past week, sparking rumours that it had been shut down.
Over the weekend, however, the first sign of 123Movies' revival was witnessed when the website returned under a new domain, 123movieshd.to.
But the pirate movie streaming website had been gone too long, giving space to copycats to take advantage of its absence. After realizing that a large chunk of its user group left, 123Movies took a drastic step to overcome the hurdle.
MeMovies.ru is Ours, but we will update the Final and Official Domain Today in few hours. Let fight against these fake sites ;) #123movies
— 123Movies (@123MoviesUK) March 28, 2017
On Tuesday, 123Movies was renamed Memovies, only to be renamed again later in the day. 123Movies is finally renamed GoMovies and the active domain was shifted to GoMovies.to, which the site representative confirmed to TorrentFreak is the final one.
The decision to change the site's name and domain came after fake sites with the same name ranked higher in search engines, which will evidently redirect traffic to the wrong sites. The site operators have also requested users to spread the word.
We're back at GoMovies.to - This is our Official Domain - new Home for 123Movies users, Old data remains the same. Please spread #123movies
— 123Movies (@123MoviesUK) March 28, 2017
TorrentFreak reported that the site's new domain will remain unchanged for a while, meaning there might be a possible change in the future again. So before you get too comfortable with the new domain, take a breath.
While promoting the new change, 123Movies, which is now GoMovies, remained mum on why the unexpected downtime occurred in the first place. The site's official Twitter handle simply said that it had encountered some server issues, which caused the downtime.
It is not a secret that anti-piracy groups are fighting hard to shut down illegal operations by such sites.
We have already seen some of the biggest torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, ISOHUNT, Kickass Torrents, EZTV and others shut down (many have since resurfaced). By shutting down some big players, there's no shortage of piracy sites offering what these giants did at one point in time.
