We can all agree that the current circumstances are certainly not working out well for anyone. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to efflux its way into various parts of the world. Authorities have had no option but to put in place movement restriction orders.

Hundreds of millions have been forced to leave their normal lives and just stay at home for weeks and months now. But even that is already starting to show its ugly head as internet traffic surges globally. The global bandwidth is receiving a huge load and its starting to show as outage reports surface in various countries including Kenya.

It is just yesterday when Safaricom Home Fibre users had an outage that lasted for almost a whole day. Reportedly, this was also a result of a sudden gush in internet usage. And yes, it is because most have to work from home as many use it for entertainment.

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Speaking of entertainment, traffic to legal streaming services has gone up significantly. Services like Netflix and Showmax have reported an increase in traffic which has ended up having a toll on streaming quality. YouTube was also reported to gain a lot of traffic enough for it to even surpass Netflix for the first time.

Piracy On The Rise

But not everyone can afford to go legal and pay for movies every month. For this, a growing interest in piracy and torrent-sharing sites has also been noticed. In countries like China where coronavirus cases began in January, the numbers visiting torrent sites has been extraordinary.

Image courtesy Torrent Freak

According to a report by Torrent Freak, the same kind upward trend was signalled globally when the pandemic started breaking out beyond China. Data shared by iknowwhatyoudownload.com also demonstrates the rising numbers logging in to public piracy sites like The Pirate Bay and YTS among more.

Clearly, there has been a global increase from March 6th to April 6th. They started off by hovering around 12 million daily, the figures went up to 16 million a month later, which is a 33% increase.

Image courtesy Torrent Freak

According to more reports, the files being shared on the sites have gone even higher. As shown, between March 31st and April 6th, the peer count went up from little over 24 million to more than 26 million on a daily basis.

Image courtesy Torrent Freak

Of course, we do not advocate piracy in any way but you would understand why the rise is being registered quite frequently. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that these numbers also reflect the situation in Kenya. There is always the perception that paying for any subscriptions is a waste of money, which is why these pirate sites are quite popular here.

Plus, many of the movies and files available on the sites are actually not available in legal streaming platforms. Right now, you would find a movie like Bad Boys For Life for free and not on Netflix or Showmax. So, why would one pay for movies when they can readily get the latest ones for free? It is clear many people want to go the illegal way as even most of the most downloaded films are those recently released from the cinema.

Be Careful What You Wish For

However, you do risk a lot by visiting these sites on a daily basis. privacy is not an option on these sites and even the traffic tracking goes to show you that. A majority of these files posted are there to inject ghost malware and viruses which could then be used to spy or even siphon your private information.

And even now when most people are just logged on to the internet 24/7, hackers have even quite busy trying to get everything they can. As good as getting movies is for free, you’d better be careful on the kind of content you download. Why risk it for just one movie.