The Real History of Megaupload

Megaupload was a file storage and sharing website founded in 2005 by Kim Schmitz, better known as Kim Dotcom, that grew into one of the most-visited sites on the internet before US federal agents shut it down in January 2012 on criminal copyright charges.

2005–2011: Rapid growth

Megaupload.com let anyone upload a file and get back a shareable link — no account needed for basic use, with a paid "Premium" tier for faster downloads and no wait times. It grew fast enough that by 2011, traffic-ranking estimates at the time placed it among the 15 most-visited websites in the world, with widely cited estimates putting its traffic at around 4% of total internet usage at its peak.

The Mega Song (June 2011)

In June 2011, Megaupload released a promotional music video — the "Mega Song" — featuring a lineup of major recording artists endorsing the site. Universal Music Group issued a takedown notice claiming unauthorized use of its artists, and Megaupload publicly disputed it, escalating tension between the site and the recording industry just months before the shutdown.

January 19, 2012: The shutdown

The US Department of Justice unsealed a criminal indictment against Megaupload and several of its executives, alleging copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering on a scale prosecutors called one of the largest criminal copyright cases in US history at the time. The FBI seized Megaupload's servers and domains the same day, taking the site offline instantly for its millions of users worldwide.

Hours later, New Zealand police — acting on the US request — raided Kim Dotcom's rented mansion in Coatesville, near Auckland, arriving by helicopter and finding Dotcom hiding in a safe room. The extradition case that followed became one of the longest-running and most closely watched legal sagas in New Zealand's history, running for well over a decade through multiple courts.

2013: Mega launches

On January 19, 2013 — exactly one year after the raid — Kim Dotcom launched Mega (mega.nz), a new, separately incorporated encrypted cloud storage company. Mega is not a continuation of Megaupload and has no shared infrastructure with it, though the two are commonly confused. See how it compares on the free cloud storage comparison page.

This domain's own, separate history

megaupload.nz is not the original Megaupload and was never part of it. Public archive records show this .nz domain first appearing online in 2016, four years after the real Megaupload was shut down, run independently as an unofficial MegaUpload-branded upload tool through the early 2020s. That version went offline in 2023. The site was later re-acquired and rebuilt as the static fan-recreation you're looking at now — a demo of the pre-2012 interface, with uploads disabled, alongside these informational and file-sharing resource pages.

FAQ