Internet Archive resumes operations in read-only mode after DDoS attacks

Internet Archive is back online in a read-only mode after suffering a series of massive DDoS attacks impacting its services last week. The platform, including its renowned Wayback Machine, is back online after some vital days of inactivity. However, the digital library is still evaluating its systems, and there is a chance that it may be shut down once more.

The Internet Archive is now available in a “provisional, read-only archive,” as described by founder Brewster Kahle. He said, “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.” Currently, users can browse 916 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine archive, but functionalities such as ‘Save Page Now’ are temporarily disabled. Kahle has urged the public to bear with the team as the work to resolve the issue and bring back normalcy continues.

These attacks, attributed to a group that went by the name of Blackmeta, affected the Internet Archive in a very big way. Blackmeta said that their goal was to check the efficiency of the platforms’ security systems and the effectiveness of their tools, which started the warfare against the digital library.

However, Internet Archive still is an essential service, having been a non-profit organization focused on caching web pages and preserving records since the early nineties. The Wayback Machine has been useful in the retrieval of old and recent website collections that enables users to access past versions of web pages.

This happened only few weeks after Google started indexing links to the websites in the Wayback Machine. Back in this year, Google had also removed links to its cached pages and that is why the presence of the Wayback Machine in the list of search results can be helpful in finding older versions of the sites or archived materials.