Megaupload Ltd was a Hong Kong–based online company established in 2005 that operated from 2005 to 2012 providing online services related to file storage and viewing.
On 19 January 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized the domain names and closed down the sites associated with Megaupload after the owners were arrested and indicted for allegedly operating as an organization dedicated to copyright infringement. Subsequently, HK$330 million (approximately US$42 million) worth of assets were frozen by the Customs and Excise Department of Hong Kong. The company's founder, New Zealand resident Kim Dotcom, has denied any wrongdoing, and the case against Dotcom has been the subject of controversy over its legality. In 2017, a New Zealand judge ruled that Dotcom should be extradited to the United States, but Dotcom remained at liberty in New Zealand pending the results of an appeal. On 5 July 2018, the New Zealand Court of Appeal found Dotcom and three of his former colleagues were eligible to be extradited to the U.S. authorities. His lawyer said they would appeal to the New Zealand Supreme Court. The shutdown of Megaupload led to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on a range of websites belonging to the U.S. government and copyright organizations by the hacktivist group Anonymous.
On , Megaupload was relaunched as Mega under the domain name mega.co.nz (later moved to mega.nz, and then to mega.io). The re-launch date was chosen to coincide with the first anniversary of Megaupload's takedown by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Company and services
The company's registered office was on the 12th floor of the Shanghai Industrial Investment Building in Room 1204 in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.
The company web services included Megaupload.com, a one-click hosting service; Megapix.com, an image hosting service; Megavideo.com and Megalive.com, video hosting services; and Megabox.com, a music hosting service. Other services included Megaclick, Megafund, Megakey and Megapay, all of which were advertisement and financial services. Along with this, four blogs were created including Megabest and Megaking. Two additional services—Megabackup and Megamovie—were in development before their closure.
Statistics
Unique visitors: 82,764,913
Page views (in history): over 1,000,000,000
Visitors per day: 50,000,000
Reach: 4%
Registered Members: 180,000,000
Storage: 25 petabytes (25,000 terabytes) Once the 13th most visited sites on the Internet According to Sandvine, MegaUpload accounted for 1% of total traffic on fixed access networks in North America. In a proceeding before the High Court of New Zealand on 2 February 2012, Kim Dotcom stated that Megaupload was "hosting 12 billion unique files for over 100 million users."
Software
Mega Manager
Megaupload also released its upload/download manager, Mega Manager, a download manager that featured a link-checker for Megaupload links as well as options to manage uploaded files, and to access the online control box that was on Megaupload.
Megakey
Megakey was an adware application which removed bandwidth limitations on Mega services during "happy hour" periods. In return, the users running Megakey agreed to supply some personal identification and demographic data and to allow the substitution of ads on third party websites they visited with those of Megaupload.
Megabox
Megabox, a new form of media downloading site, was the first of its kind. Kim "Dotcom" described Megabox as "very similar to iTunes" except that it operated in a web browser using HTML5 technology and loaded "much faster than iTunes or anything else out there."
FileBox
FileBox was a Flash applet that could be embedded onto any external webpage. It allowed users to upload content to Megaupload without having to visit the website itself or download the Mega Manager.
Reception
Unavailability
Although incorporated in Hong Kong, the company did not operate there. From 2009 onward, users with Hong Kong IP addresses were banned from accessing the site. The reason for the block was never disclosed by Megaupload, but Hong Kong customs officials have suggested that the block was an attempt to hinder law enforcement investigation.
As of 23 May 2010, access to Megaupload was intermittently blocked by the Internet authorities in Saudi Arabia by their regulator Communications and Information Technology Commission. Megavideo was also intermittently blocked in the United Arab Emirates due to pornographic content being accessible through the service.