Posted: 23rd Jan, 2012 By: MarkJ

Last week's high profile anti-piracy FBI (USA) closure of
Megaupload, one of the world's biggest online file storage (
cyberlocker) websites, was so significant that global internet traffic was seen "
plummeting" for two hours after the announcement on Thursday 19th January 2012.
Arbor Networks, an internet security giant, reports that three main client regions were impacted -
Asia-Pacific,
Europe and the
USA. The top countries (in aggregate) using MegaUpload were the United States, France, Germany, Brazil, Great Britain, Turkey, Italy and Spain; although dozens more countries are represented.
Arbor Networks Jose Nazario said:
"As you would expect, this was a wildly popular site with users from all over the world. So much so that even notable celebrities appear in a video discussing MegaUpload, almost endorsing it. Previous work by Arbor Networks showed that content providers and hosting sites like MegaUpload are the new “Hyper Giants”. With enough global data, you can actually see the traffic drop when the shutdown occurs. Based strictly on the traffic rates it appears that the shutdown started just after 19:00 GMT on January 19, with traffic plummeting down over the next two hours."
So if the Internet seems to be running a bit smoother this week then that could be one of the reasons; in reality you probably wouldn't have noticed. A number of similar file sharing sites, such as
Filesonic, have followed the closure by imposing tough new restrictions upon their own service.