24 hours' notice was given for the shutdown of Exhentai, leading users on the image board 4chan to attempt to archive the entire site before it closed on July 27. Vice speculated that the shutdown was in reaction to the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market adopted by the European Union in June 2019, which makes digital platforms legally liable for material posted by users that violates copyright, as well as a July 2019 proposal by Dutch Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus to impose harsher punishments on websites that do not rapidly remove child pornography. On July 26, 2019, E-Hentai and Exhentai announced that both sites would shut down in response to "recent legislative changes in the Netherlands", where the servers of the sites were hosted at the time. In June 2019, both sites were removed from Google, per the company's policy of de-listing websites that violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Access to Exhentai requires an existing E-Hentai account for individuals without an account, Exhentai appears as a blank page with an illustration of a crying panda, and has consequently has earned the nickname "Sad Panda" among users of the site. Existing galleries containing this content were deleted from the site, amounting to the removal of approximately 30,000 of the website's 150,000 galleries this content was later spun off onto Exhentai, a sister site to E-Hentai. On March 27, 2010, E-Hentai announced that in response to pressure from advertisers, it would no longer host artwork depicting underage characters ( lolicon and shotacon) and bestiality. net domain lapsed and was purchased by another party. org domain in 2005 after ownership of its. net domain in 2001 before moving to its current. E-Hentai launched as a Yahoo! Group on July 1, 1999.