"Old" software engineer and also a Swede here. I and my team kept another service with 100x-1000x the amount of traffic of TPB (in terms of bandwidth and requests/s) running for a decade, and perhaps 100x more computationally intensive. Their service is a lot simpler than most people probably think it is.

I know for a fact that Sunde is a left-wing/communist/narco-libertarian political tool.

• TPB has had many years to practice their resilience
• TPB is a largely a read-only service, which means they were able to scale via aggressively caching reverse-proxies alone. It's whats known as an embarrassingly parallel problem. Something even perpetually drugged "kids" in their now late 30s can handle.
• TPB has been malfunctioning the past couple of weeks - the top lists don't work