Megaupload
More info
- Creator
- Kim Dotcom
- Released
- 2005–2012
- Type
- File hosting service
- Successor
- Mega (2013)
The Hong Kong file locker that made its money from people sharing films, until the US Justice Department switched it off in a single day.
Kim Dotcom, born Schmitz, founded Megaupload in 2005. It was a cyberlocker: upload a file, get a link. Free users waited and crawled; paying users got speed. The model rewarded popular files, and the most popular files were rarely holiday photos. Its sibling Megavideo did the same for streaming video.
On 19 January 2012 the FBI seized the domains, and the next day New Zealand police raided Dotcom's mansion outside Auckland. Anonymous replied with denial-of-service attacks on targets including the Justice Department. Dotcom launched Mega in 2013 and spent the following decade fighting extradition to the United States, which New Zealand's justice minister finally signed off in 2024.