Pirate Streaming Site Soap2day Shuts Down, Users In Shambles
June 13, 2023The pirate streaming service Soap2day abruptly announced it was shutting down permanently on Tuesday, prompting an outcry of grief from its users on social media. The site allowed people to watch movies and shows without paying for subscription services.
The Soap2day shutdown announcement came early Tuesday morning, when the site’s moderators left a short goodbye note on the front page and scrubbed it of its content.
“Hello guys,” the note reads. “We have decided to close soap2day forever. We are very sorry :) Bye.” When the site is opened, the tab title reads “soap2day is closed.”
Soap2day was immensely popular, and its users on Twitter are greatly upset about the loss. Many are posting Tweets shocked by the news, often adding GIFs of people crying. Numerous tweets mourning the loss of the site have racked up thousands of likes and retweets.
"first zlibrary and now soap2day, goodbye, you did more for cinema than many," wrote one user in a tweet with over 3,500 likes, referring to Z-Library, an online resource that shut down in 2022 but has since returned under a new domain.
This isn’t the first time Soap2day has run into issues—in 2020, it was reportedly delisted from Google. Many suspected the reason was copyright infringement, since it illegally allowed users to stream content for free. A Google Transparency Report for the domain soap2day.to shows that the company has received tens of thousands of requests to delist URLs from search due to copyright infringement on behalf of rights holders including Disney and Warner Bros. Google acted on about 30 percent of the requests. Roughly 70 percent were marked as not being indexed, with only 9 requests having no action taken.
The shutdown also comes merely two weeks after RARBG, one of the largest and longest-running torrent sites on the Internet, shut down, citing the war in Ukraine, COVID-19, and inflation. RARBG staff closed the site at the end of May, leaving an apologetic message on the homepage explaining the causes.
With the loss of Soap2day, users on Twitter are also sharing alternative streaming sites. Others maintain that Soap2day can never be replaced.