After Sustained Attacks, the Internet Archive Partially Restores Service Offering Read-Only Snapshots Without New Content Storage

Since May 2024, the renowned nonprofit project, the Internet Archive, has been under a hacker assault, predominantly facing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks have intermittently prevented users from accessing saved content on the Wayback Machine.

However, the situation worsened towards the end of September. On one hand, the DDoS attacks on the Internet Archive did not cease, and on the other, hackers found new ways to infiltrate its servers and steal data.

As of the time this article was published, the personal registration information of at least 31 million Internet Archive users has been stolen and gradually disclosed. Fortunately, no confidential information has been leaked.

Due to DDoS and other forms of attacks, the Internet Archive was temporarily taken offline for several days. Today, the Internet Archive announced that the Wayback Machine feature is back online in a read-only snapshot format.

The term "read-only snapshot" means that users can search for historical snapshots of specific web pages through the Wayback Machine but are unable to save new snapshots. Currently, it is impossible to save any new snapshots across the site, a functionality that will require future restoration.

The temporary restoration of the read-only snapshot feature partially reinstates user access. For many users, the Internet Archive is an invaluable tool, and its prolonged unavailability has indeed caused inconvenience.

Considering that the attacks have not ceased, the administrators of the Internet Archive have issued a warning that the read-only snapshot feature might also undergo maintenance due to other issues. Therefore, it’s a situation of making the most out of what is currently available.