There are rumors around that Rapidshare was shut down and their servers seized. Yesterday, the german RIAA-equivalent "GEMA" apparently had won an injunction against Rapidshare.com.
However: that injunction was last year. Most news articles are dated January 19 2007, so I guess that is causing some confusion. Maybe they have just yet another downtime. DNS issues or something like that.

If anyone comes across a reliable source, please post.

Rapidshare is working again.

dubjapie:

As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare's servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue - "There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)"

Rapidshare.com is located in Switzerland, thus they are in a country that isn't even part of the European Union. So neither German nor EU law is competent for them. But indeed, their servers are positioned quite near to the German central Internet Exchange Point DE-CIX in Frankfurt, a fact that gave GEMA some limited juridical ammunition.

From the adjudication seen in the last years in Germany I would expect that RS.COM is an will be for the foreseeable future a legal service. The injunction last year made that quite clear, even while GEMA tried to call it a victory, the court only ordered RS.COM to supervise two websites (rapidshared.org/link.io) with links to files on RS. An idea only a judge could come up with. But they stated that RS is no offender or partaking in copyright infringement.

Update: For those who are interested in the problem RS faced. The connection to one of their carriers, Level 3, completely broke and thus they had a whooping 50Gb/s less bandwidth. Not a good thing on a Saturday evening, especially, because their DNS-Servers are in the IP range of Level 3 as well. So if you didn't have had cached the corresponding DNS to IP resolution, you couldn't reach the other running servers as well. Still enough people had the correct IPs and completely sucked the remaining 140Gb/s, bringing the rest of the server farm to a crawl, too.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Brothers ;))

And good luck to all of you!