Archive.org: "Wayback Machine" back online with restrictions after attacks

The "Wayback Machine", probably the Internet Archive's best-known service, is available again. As the Internet chroniclers announced on their homepage and various social networks, they have reactivated the website time machine, albeit in "read only" mode. All other digital library services are currently still offline while the clean-up and repair work continues.

As Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, reported on Mastodon, technicians are activating the services one by one as soon as it seems safe to do so. They have also resumed initial crawling activities – albeit on a very limited scale and only for the National Library of the United States. The remaining services remain offline for the time being for security reasons.

The "Wayback Machine" is now accessible to users again and contains historical website data up to and including October 10 of this year. According to Kahle, no new data is currently being added and should further repair work become necessary, the archive could be taken offline again. "Please be careful," he asks users.

Attackers were not very careful when they attacked the Internet Archive several times in recent weeks. In addition to draining millions of user accounts, they defaced the archive in the second week of October using a supply chain attack and launched several dDoS attacks. An activist group took responsibility for the attacks, but has since moved on to other targets.

(cku)