The Pirate Bay was down for more than a week with most visitors displaying a Cloudflare error mentioning that a “bad gateway” is causing problems. A reputable source with a direct link with the operators told Torrent Freak that the recent Pirate Bay downtime issues “were likely caused by malicious actors who DDoSed the site’s search engine with specially crafted search queries” The attacker(s) flooded the Pirate Bay with “searches that break the Sphinx search daemon,” effectively crashing the torrent download website.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/the-pirate-bay-down.html