Anna’s Archive Domain Suspended Amid Growing Legal Pressure

Anna’s Archive, a well‑known meta‑search engine for shadow libraries, has experienced a sudden global outage of its primary domain, annas-archive.org, which was moved to a "serverHold" status by the domain registry. A serverHold effectively suspends the domain and initiates an investigation, a drastic step that is rarely, if ever, taken against non‑commercial .org names. Founded in the fall of 2022 shortly after the U.S. authorities railed into Z‑Library, Anna’s Archive was designed to preserve the accessibility of copyrighted material under the banner of "free books and articles". Since launch the site has also been a resource for artificial‑intelligence researchers seeking large corpora for model training. In late 2023 the operator unveiled a 300 TB backup of Spotify’s catalog—an unprecedented torrent that the site is slowly releasing to the public. The domain suspension comes at a time of mounting legal pressure. The most recent lawsuit saw the library sued in the United States after it scraped WorldCat, prompting the OCLC to seek an injunction that could force intermediaries such as domain registries to act. While that particular injunction has yet to be granted, it illustrates the pattern of court‑ordered actions that threaten to cripple the platform. Under normal circumstances, the .org registry operator, the Public Interest Registry (PIR), has been reluctant to suspend domains without a court order and has previously declined to voluntarily suspend high‑profile pirate sites such as thepiratebay.org. The abrupt serverHold on annas-archive.org therefore strongly implies that the registry has received a legal directive—most likely an injunction—prompted by rights holders reacting to the Spotify backup. PIR was asked by TorrentFreak for comment on the suspension, but no response has been received. In the absence of an official statement, observers surmise that the move may relate either to the new Spotify archive or to the ongoing WorldCat litigation, or possibly both. Either scenario would signal that the legal environment is becoming increasingly hostile to shadow libraries operating under .org names. Anna’s Archive has historically demonstrated resilience. After an earlier seizure forced the site to move from its original .org domain to a .gs domain, the .gs registry swiftly suspended that address as well, prompting the operator to revert back to the .org name. At present the platform remains reachable via older .li and .se domains and through newly assigned .in and .pm addresses. A spokesperson on the site’s community forum reassured users that the suspension was a temporary hiccup, directing them to the library’s Wikipedia page for the latest operational domain list. The operator also explicitly denied that the Spotify backup was the root cause, emphasizing that the community will continue to adapt as regulatory and technical challenges arise.