Wayback Machine back online after DDoS attack
But it’s read-only for now
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is back online following a devastating distributed denial of service attack which knocked out its services last week and coincided with the theft of emails and encrypted passwords of 31 million users.
In a post on Mastodon on Monday, founder Brewster Kale confirmed the Archive’s services had “resumed in a provisional, read-only manner,” meaning that new pages cannot be saved to the Wayback Machine, until it has been further restored.
Kahle went on to say that further maintenance may be necessary, in which case the site will be suspended again. “Please be gentle,” he urged.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of web pages dating all the way back to 1996.
Other services offered by the Internet Archive, including the Open Library, a collection of millions of digitised books, and the audio archive, which contains 15 million public domain recordings, remain unavailable.
It is not known who perpetrated the DDoS attack on the Internet Archive or who stole and published the user information.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit based in San Francisco, was founded by Kahle in 1996 after he became concerned about the ephemeral nature of the rapidly emerging digital space, believing in the societal importance of preserving the digital record for posterity.
An advocate for open access to information, he aimed to create a digital library that would preserve this information for future generations, ensuring that it remains accessible and available.
This approach has led to several copyright cases against the Internet Archive, including recent action by publisher Hachette, in which one of the Archive’s book digitisation projects was found to be in violation of US copyright law.
As of January, the Wayback Machine contained 860 billion web pages housed over a total of more than 99 petabytes of storage.