KickassTorrents
website providing torrent files and magnet links
KickassTorrents (commonly abbreviated KAT) was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.
In December 2016, former KAT staff members revived the KAT community by creating a website with its predecessor's features and appearance.
History
KAT was initially launched in November 2008 at the domain name kickasstorrents.com. In April 2011, it moved to a Philippine domain kat.ph after a series of domain name seizures by the US Department of Justice against Demonoid and Torrentz. The site later moved across several different domains, which the operators planned to do every six months, including ka.tt, kickass.to, kickass.so, kickasstorrents.im and kat.cr.
In June 2016, KAT added an official Tor network .onion address.
Blocking and censorship
KickassTorrents on its website claimed that it complied with the DMCA and it removed infringing torrents reported by content owners.
The public source identifies “KickassTorrents” as website providing torrent files and magnet links. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around KickassTorrents, website and providing.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17062285. 3 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 9 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2014, 2016 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “KickassTorrents” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.