Following the shutdown of HiAnime and AnimeKai, yet another major anime streaming website, which has been active for over 15 years, has quietly gone dark.
Per TorrentFreak, AnimeFLV, the world’s largest Spanish-language anime piracy site, has suddenly stopped serving videos to visitors. This issue came to light in mid-June, when the site’s video player began displaying a message that no videos were available when viewers attempted to watch an episode.
It was later revealed via bug reports on GitHub that AnimeFLV’s video player had no sources at all, essentially confirming that the site was no longer working. While visitors can still see the list of episodes and the anime directory, watching videos on the platform is no longer possible as of writing.
Anime Streaming Site AnimeFLV Goes Dark
Currently, there has been no official statement from the operators of AnimeFLV regarding the site’s shutdown, and no piracy watchdogs have claimed responsibility for the site going down. AnimeFLV.net and its related domains attracted over 70 million visitors in the month of June alone.
AnimeFLV had initially run into technical issues in April 2026 when the backend infrastructure of many prominent pirate sites was knocked offline. These sites were linked to MegaCloud and VidCloud, which acted as a hosting platform for these streaming websites. The website, however, recovered from these issues temporarily.
Around the same time, the largest Spanish-language manga piracy websites, Tumangaonline and ZonaTMO, were also taken down by South Korean authorities. Furthermore, the world’s largest anime streaming sites HiAnime and AnimeKai also confirmed they had shut down their websites for good.
It is not confirmed whether AnimeFLV going dark is related to these incidents, or to the operators of HiAnime being arrested earlier this month in Vietnam. The Motion Picture Association, in its official Notorious Markets Report last year, noted that AnimeFLV was operated out of Peru, Chile and Mexico, making the latter scenario highly unlikely.
AnimeFLV Has Long Been a Target for Anti-Piracy Organizations
AnimeFLV is believed to have been established in 2010, and over the course of the last 15 years, it has managed to attract the attention of major anti-piracy organizations. In 2019, under mounting copyright pressure, AnimeFLV published an announcement stating that it would begin removing content licensed by platforms like Crunchyroll to steer towards legal avenues.
However, this turned out to be an empty promise, as the site continued to operate illegally and attract billions of visitors. Between July 2023 and July 2024, AnimeFLV received over 1.46 billion visits and was flagged as a notorious market in the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) submissions in subsequent years. Even then, the site continued to operate without any major issues until recently.
Interestingly, AnimeFLV was also rumored to have links with Anime Onegai, a legal streaming platform launched in early 2020, to distribute anime directly from Japan to Latin America.
Many believed that operators behind AnimeFLV and another pirate site, AnimeYT, had partnered to establish the service, despite Anime Onegai officially being linked to ANIMEKA LLP and Remow Co., Ltd., attempting to replicate Crunchyroll’s early history. However, Anime Onegai stopped its services in October 2025.
