What Happened to Megaupload

Megaupload was shut down on 19 January 2012, when the United States Department of Justice unsealed a criminal indictment and the FBI seized the site's servers and domain names. It went offline the same day and has never returned. The files stored on it were not preserved, and no one — not Kim Dotcom, not this website, not any service claiming otherwise — can recover them.

The full timeline

How big was Megaupload?

Megaupload let anyone upload a file and get back a shareable link. No account was needed for basic use, and a paid Premium tier removed wait times and speed caps. That simplicity is what made it enormous: by 2011, traffic-ranking estimates of the era placed it among the fifteen most-visited websites in the world. The often-repeated claim that it accounted for around 4% of all internet traffic comes from figures Megaupload itself promoted, so it is best treated as a company estimate rather than an independently measured one.

Its size was also the prosecution's argument. The indictment alleged the business was built on paying users storing and sharing copyrighted material, costing film studios and record labels more than $500 million while generating over $175 million in revenue for the operation.

19 January 2012: the raid

The DOJ unsealed an indictment charging Megaupload and several executives with conspiracy to commit racketeering, criminal copyright infringement and money laundering — a case prosecutors described at the time as one of the largest criminal copyright prosecutions the US had brought. The FBI seized the servers and the domains simultaneously, so the site did not wind down. It simply stopped.

Hours later, New Zealand police acting on the US request raided Kim Dotcom's rented mansion at Coatesville, north of Auckland, arriving by helicopter. Dotcom was found in a safe room inside the house. The extradition fight that began that morning became one of the longest-running legal sagas in New Zealand's history.

What happened to everyone's files?

This is the part most accounts skip, and it is the question most people actually arrive with. Megaupload did not own the machines its users' files sat on. It leased them, principally from Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications. When the indictment froze Megaupload's funds, those bills stopped being paid, and the hosting companies were left holding more than a thousand servers nobody was paying for.

Within two weeks, US Attorney Neil MacBride filed a letter noting the providers might begin deleting server contents as early as 2 February 2012. Carpathia said publicly that it had never had access to the content on those servers and had no mechanism to return anything to Megaupload's customers. It worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on an effort to help users with legitimate files, but that effort never produced a general recovery route. In August 2015, Carpathia's new parent asked a court for permission to wipe the 1,103 servers outright rather than keep absorbing the cost.

The practical answer, fourteen years on: if you had files on Megaupload, they are gone. There is no archive, no backup and no request process. If you need somewhere to put files today, compare the current free cloud storage options or the self-expiring hosts instead.

What happened to the people charged?

The case did not end with the site. Finn Batato, Megaupload's chief marketing officer, had the US charges against him dropped in 2021 after a terminal cancer diagnosis; he died in June 2022. Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk struck a deal to plead guilty and be sentenced in New Zealand rather than face extradition. In June 2023 they received 2 years 7 months and 2 years 6 months respectively, heavily discounted for their guilty pleas and for assistance offered to the FBI. Both were released in July 2024 after serving 13 months, and both were banned from being company directors until 2028.

That left Kim Dotcom alone as the extradition target. On 15 August 2024, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the order to surrender him to the United States. Dotcom challenged it, and on 1 July 2026 the Court of Appeal dismissed that challenge on every point, awarding costs against him with an uplift over a late attempt to delay proceedings that the court found misleading. His remaining route is a discretionary application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, which had already declined to hear his eligibility appeal in 2020. New Zealand courts have referred to a potential US sentence in the range of 30 to 150 years.

Mega is not Megaupload

On 19 January 2013 — exactly one year after the raid — Kim Dotcom launched Mega, now mega.nz, a separately incorporated encrypted cloud storage company. The two are constantly confused because of the name and the founder, but Mega is not a continuation of Megaupload, shares none of its infrastructure, and holds none of its data. Looking for an old Megaupload file in a Mega account will not work. Dotcom later parted ways with Mega and has publicly distanced himself from the company.

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 domain was later re-acquired and rebuilt as the static recreation you are reading now: a demo of the pre-2012 interface with uploads disabled, alongside these reference pages.

Old megaupload.com links sometimes still circulate on forums and download aggregators, and some of them point here by accident of the shared name. They will not resolve to a file on this site or anywhere else, because the file does not exist. Requests to those addresses return 410 Gone.

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