Solo Leveling Publisher Named Following 2026’s Biggest Manga Site Shutdown

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Bato.to, a very popular website known for hosting pirated comics, recently closed down. It’s now been discovered that Kakao Entertainment, the company that publishes the hit series Solo Leveling, was behind the shutdown and plans to target other related piracy sites as well.

According to TorrentFreak, Kakao Entertainment’s anti-piracy team, P.CoK, is responsible for the shutdown of the manga website Bato.to. P.CoK located the site’s creator and main developer, determined where they live, and has begun legal action against them in that country.

For months, the website had been experiencing major technical problems. The main person in charge, Larry, couldn’t be reached, which caused ongoing server errors for the team. When the site eventually went down for good, many users at first thought it was just another temporary glitch, like they’d seen before. But this time, it was a permanent shutdown.

Solo Leveling Publisher Kakao Entertainment Responsible for Confirmed Bato.to Shutdown

Kakao Entertainment announced it has tracked down most of the people running the illegal manga site, including those who built and managed it. They’ve sent legal notices demanding they stop their activities. By targeting these specific individuals, Kakao Entertainment has effectively shut down the network that kept the piracy site operating.

This method caused the official Bato.to Discord server and subreddit to completely separate themselves from the platform, worried about potential legal trouble. Although former Discord staff have created a new community, the server now has a firm rule against piracy. It was this strong legal action against those running and managing the platform that originally caused it to shut down.

MangaPark and AniXL the Next Legal Targets for Manga Site Shutdowns

The group monitoring piracy has discovered that many people running the Bato.to website are also connected to other illegal sites, suggesting more shutdowns are likely. Currently, Kakao Entertainment is focusing on MangaPark and AniXL, believing they are operated by the same individuals.

I recently learned that some people running MangaPark and AniXL are also connected to Bato.com. The people behind our service are now getting ready to take strong legal action against both Mangapark and any new websites that are connected to Bato.

In February 2025, Kakao published its sixth report on fighting piracy, revealing they removed 240 million pieces of illegal content in just the latter half of 2024. That same year, their strong enforcement efforts led to the shutdown of a major English-language site that illegally distributed manhwa (Korean comics). Kakao also played a key role in an unusually large crackdown on piracy in May 2025, resulting in the removal of around 7,000 titles and significantly disrupting the global network of illegal manga and webtoon distribution.

Although new websites similar to Bato.to are appearing, the original publisher has cautioned that its technology for monitoring online activity now extends to anonymous online groups and social media platforms around the globe.

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2026-01-23 22:38