The Internet Archive has been defending itself against DDoS attacks for days

If you haven’t been able to access the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine over the past few days, it’s because the site has been under attack. In fact, the nonprofit announced in a blog post that it is currently on its “third day of fending off an intermittent DDoS cyberattack.” Over Memorial Day weekend, the organization posted on Twitter/X that most of its services were unavailable because malicious actors were bombarding its site with “tens of thousands of bogus requests for information per second.” On Tuesday morning, it warned that service disruptions were “continuing” because attackers had not stopped targeting it.

However, the site’s data does not appear to have been affected, and you can still look up the contents of previous pages if you were able to access them. “Fortunately, the collections are secure, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack knocked us offline at times over the past three days,” Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder, said in a statement. “With the support of others and the hard work of staff, we are strengthening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is that this attack was sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and – importantly – vicious.”

The Internet Archive has not yet identified the source of the attacks, but said that libraries and similar institutions are becoming more frequent targets of attacks these days. One of the institutions mentioned was the British Library, whose online information system was held hostage and ransom by a hacker group last year. It also said that the library is being sued by the US book publishing and recording industries, which accuse it of copyright infringement.