Is Internet Archive down on your end? Well, you're not the only one

Is Internet Archive down? That’s one question everyone has been asking. Users of the popular platform for digital libraries (aka. The Wayback Machine) have reported that the website (internetarchive.org) is down and inaccessible.

According to Down Detector, a website that monitors websites’ outages, the Internet Archive outage began on October 9, starting around 10:30 AM EDT. It experienced a peak at around 10 PM on the same date and had reports slowed down a little bit, but they surged once again on October 10, at around 4 AM EDT.

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder, confirmed on X that it was a DDoS attack and a data breach. He says that while the passwords were encrypted using a secure algorithm, the breach still exposed sensitive information.

Around 31 million records have been affected by this breach, where the hackers stole email addresses, usernames, timestamps of password changes, and encrypted passwords. In another tweet, this time dated October 10, Kahle also said that the attack was back.

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!,” the Javascript warning reads, which pops up once you open the website, referring to the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service.

Blackmeta, a DDoS organization, took full blame for the attack with rather cryptic messages. “We have been launching several highly successful attacks for five long hours and, to this moment, all their systems are completely down,” the tweet reads.

Although Internet Archive is a full non-profit, the organization also says that the “archive belongs to the US,” a country with a “horrendous and hypocritical government” that “supports the genocide,” referring to the ongoing Israel aggression on Palestinian soil and its surrounding.

Ouch.