Music piracy site What.cd has been shut down

Music piracy site What.cd has shut down, it announced on its Twitter account on November 17.

What.cd was an invite-only piracy site that offered a catalogue of music for free.

Reddit user NateHevens described it as "the Library of Alexandria for music. Between the list of music and formats, to the collages, the top tens, the community interaction ... What.CD was the pinnacle of music collection."

A Twitter account belonging to What.cd said on November 17 that the torrent site would shut down "due to some recent events". Ars Technica reports that people had been talking about What.cd being offline since November 16.

The Twitter account also claimed that "all site and user data has been destroyed". That was likely a deliberate act to attempt to keep users anonymous.

It's not clear exactly why What.cd shut down. French technology news site Zataz reported on November 17 that French police seized servers belonging to the torrent site, and that's what caused the site to go offline.

But a What.cd administrator told Ars Technica that the decision to shut the site down came from the people who maintain it, not the police. The unnamed administrator didn't rule out a police raid, though, and suggested that it is probably true.