I'm sticking with 7.1a for the time being.

Now I start my search for a replacement product.

The fact that the web page is telling people to use BitLocker (BitLocker!!!) of all things is a very clear sign that one of two things happened:

1.) They were hacked and somehow lost control of absolutely all their data, keys, certificates, etc. The hackers are doing it for the lulz of TrueCrypt recommending BitLocker, for all intents and purposes their "opposite."

2.) The US government made an ultimatum to give them a backdoor. Instead they shut down and by recommending BitLocker they are letting everyone who is familiar with TrueCrypt and BitLocer know that something really bizarre just happened and to make our own conclusions. They can't explain what happened because they have been told they would go to prison, as we learned from Lavabit.

It's inconceivable that they just quit the project out of the blue and recommended BitLocker without any logical reason or explanation.

Try to find a cached version of www.truecrypt.org. I sure can't find one. Getting errors on the Google cached version and Archive.org. I don't claim that I use those tools often, but I've never seen errors like that for heavily trafficked web sites.

Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that any 7.1a exe installed weeks or months ago would have anything fishy going on with it, and the crypto audit report just concluded that it has no critical flaws and no backdoor. Unfortunately they didn't put an md5 of the .exes they analyzed (only for the source code), so it's hard to know if a copy downloaded today is the same as the ones audited. Hopefully some "known good" copies will be mirrored. The scrubbing of truecrypt.org from the main website caches is creepy (if ml that is in fact what happened). The site had excellent tutorials and documentation - who knows if anyone bothered to save a copy of the site.