What happened to RARBG
In May 2023 the RARBG team published a short farewell message: rising costs and health issues within the team made the project unsustainable, and they were shutting down for good. Unlike most torrent-site “deaths”, this wasn't a seizure or a domain game — it was a deliberate, announced closure. The site, its API (used by countless apps), and its release database all went offline.
That's why RARBG searches behave differently from 1337x or TPB searches: there is no real site behind the name anymore. Blocked sites can be reached through a proxy; a closed site cannot.
What the “RARBG proxies” of 2026 actually are
| What you find | What it really is |
|---|---|
| “RARBG mirror” / “RARBG proxy” sites | Clones serving the pre-2023 scraped database — nothing new since the shutdown |
| “RARBG is back on a new domain!” | Traffic-grab announcements; the team publicly quit and never returned |
| RARBG-branded apps and APKs | Highest risk — repacked apps requesting broad permissions |
Because visitors arrive expecting a dead site, clone operators optimise purely for extraction: aggressive ads, fake “verify” prompts, swapped download buttons. The mirror risks from our 1337x guide apply in their worst form.
What former RARBG users actually use now
The audience largely moved to the living indexes — 1337x and The Pirate Bay — which have their own blocked-domain situations, covered in our guides. If those are blocked on your network, the fix is the same private-route pattern:
- Private proxy IP in an unrestricted country (residential blends in best).
- Browser- or system-level setup — the SOCKS5 guide covers every device.
- Real domain, direct, certificate checked.