Popular file hosting service Anon Files is offline due to extensive abuse

The popular, anonymous file hosting service Anon Files is offline. The administrators of the service stopped immediately because they could no longer handle the moderation of uploads and had to deal with too much abuse.

The website anonfiles.com is offline and the service can no longer be used. The creators have posted a short text on the site in which they write that the ‘extreme amounts of users abusing the service, and the headaches it caused us’ are no longer worth continuing. The administrators say they had to handle “tens of millions of uploads and many petabytes” of data.

According to the administrators, many tools and methods have been used in recent years to prevent abuse of the service. For example, ‘hundreds of thousands’ of files were automatically banned and pattern recognition was applied to ban certain users and files. “That happened so much that we no longer even cared if we accidentally deleted thousands of false positives,” the makers write in frustration. “Even after all these measures, the high volumes of abuse did not stop. This is not the work we envisioned when we took over.” Recently, a proxy provider also removed Anon Files from its service. The makers still want to sell the domain name, but have no plans for a restart.

Anon Files started two years ago as an anonymous file hosting service. Users could host content on it without an account. The website quickly grew into one of the largest and best-known in its field, although users complained about malware and aggressive advertisements distributed through the platform.