Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine, is under sustained DDoS attack

The Internet Archive, best known for its Wayback Machine, says that it has been under a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for several days. The non-profit says that it is in contact with the attackers, though their motivation is as yet unclear …

Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a Californian non-profit whose ambitious goal is to create a digital library of “all knowledge.”

It is today almost synonymous with its best-known project, the Wayback Machine. This aims to preserve a comprehensive record of the public web, so that if websites go offline or webpages are deleted, an earlier snapshot can be accessed.

The organization says that its archive contains:

• 835 billion web pages
• 44 million books and texts
• 15 million audio recordings (including 255,000 live concerts)
• 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million Television News programs)
• 4.8 million images
• 1 million software programs

Under sustained DDoS attack

PC Mag reports that the company has said that it is facing an ongoing DDoS attack. This is a type of attack where networks of bots are used to repeatedly hit a server with millions of requests, beyond its capacity to cope, effectively taking it offline to anyone else.

The attacks began over the Memorial Day long weekend, according to the California-based nonprofit and several users who said they were unable to access the digital archive site for several hours on Monday.

“Archive.org is under a DDoS attack,” the nonprofit’s X account wrote Monday morning. “The data is not affected, but most services are unavailable.” 

A few hours later, the nonprofit added that there was some “back and forth with the attackers.” The organization said it made some changes to its service, but has not yet shared further details on the identity of the attackers or any possible reason for the attack.

The archive has faced multiple lawsuits from publishers and music labels for copyright infringement. The organization has defended its archiving of copyrighted material by comparing itself to a lending library, though it has lost at least one of these cases.

It’s not likely that any of these companies are behind the attacks, so currently the mystery remains.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash