The last episodes of drama/thriller/mystery TV series LOST have managed to shatter BitTorrent transfer records, as fans of the series rush to illegally download and view the show before the series is (inevitably) spoiled for them.

That simultaneous broadcast doesn't seem to have worked as well as they'd hoped...

According to the folks at TorrentFreak, who’ve been watching BitTorrent traffic like a pack of hawks, the last two episodes of Lost, which aired as a single, feature length episode, have seen a tremendous amount of traffic over the various illegal filesharing networks, breaking records for content downloaded via Bittorrent. The figure that they’ve come to expect for the show is around 6 million downloads for a single episode. They go on to point out that the average episode of LOST will be downloaded in the region of 1.5 million times in the first week after it’s aired.

Those figures pale in comparison to the numbers for the finale, which saw 900,000 downloads in the 20 hours following their arrival on BitTorrent. That much alone is fairly staggering, and it’s expected, they say, to swell to in the neighbourhood of four or five million by the end of this week. It’s impressive stuff, but what of the various plans in place to stave off piracy for the closing of the series?

Unfortunately, it seems that the plan to simply air the finale simultaneously around the world hasn’t stopped piracy to any noticeable extent. The supposition for the moment seems to be that people became so worried that the series’ ending would be spoiled for them (a worry only deepened by the fact that friends may well have stayed up to watch the finale at 5am) and were consequently compelled to download the ending in order to get to it as quickly as possible.