One of the bigger names in pirated anime streaming, AnimeKai, has just gone offline. While the usual takedown from corporations is expected, the issue this time around seems unusually dramatic. A post on the r/AnimeKAI subreddit, labeled as an official announcement, says AnimeKai will be shutting down. The reason? Problems in running the site, especially a data center being on fire.
What’s next for AnimeKai users?
The AnimeKai post doesn’t leave much room for optimism. It says the project is ending and tells its userbase that it is “time for all of us to move on.” The community itself will apparently remain active, but the site is not expected to continue in its current form. The official message blamed “recent issues with the site,” especially a data center being on fire, and said the developer would no longer continue the project. Users were told to export their bookmarks and anime lists while they still could.
A separate r/Piracy thread included what one user said was a copied message from AnimeKai’s Discord, warning that “AnimeKai is gone for good” and that any working site using the AnimeKai name should be treated as fake. The reaction to this news has been predictable. Considering the number of popular anime piracy websites getting removed, users of the platform are frantically making backups, mourning their loss, and expressing their frustrations online.
How a fire was the end of a legacy
The stranger part of the story is the data center fire. NL Times reported that firefighters brought a fire at the NorthC Data Center in Almere under control late Thursday evening. The fire caused outages across the Netherlands for organizations with servers in the facility, including Utrecht University, Statistics Netherlands, TransDev, and several GP practices.
However, no servers or data carriers had caught fire. Only part of the power supply burned down, and the facility’s power was switched off at the fire department’s request. Meaning, the “server burnt down” framing appears to be an oversimplification. In the AnimeKai community, some users also pushed back on the idea that the site would have to rebuild from zero, pointing out that reports indicated the power infrastructure was damaged rather than the actual servers. And yet, the official community message claims the fire was one of the key reasons for the site going down for good.
Piracy sites usually disappear because of takedowns, domain seizures, legal pressure, operator exits. The anime community has already lost popular sites like 9Anime, HiAnime, AnimeSuge, and a few others in the six months. So it looks like a weird end for a piracy site, which is joining this list of a fiery accident.
But if you have a Netflix subscription, you should check out our list of the best Anime on the streaming service. For those on Amazon Prime Video, we have a dedicated list for that too.