On October 9, the popular Internet Archive site became inaccessible. In a message on the site"s main page, the site confirmed that it had been hit by a cyber attack. Brewster Kahle, the founder of Internet Archive, confirmed in a post on X that there was a breach of user names, email addresses, and encrypted passwords. 31 million accounts were affected.
Earlier this morning, one part of the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine website history service, finally came back online. In a new message on his X account, Kahle stated the site is currently in a read-only mode. That means users cannot capture the image of a website in its current state and upload it to the Wayback Machine.
The @internetarchive’s Wayback Machine resumed in a provisional, read-only manner.
— Brewster Kahle (@brewster_kahle) October 14, 2024
Sorry, no Save Page Now yet.
Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.
Please be gentle https://t.co/sb5tlvxQ26
More as it happens.
Kahle mentioned that the site could be "suspended again" if the Wayback Machine site needed further maintenance. The main Internet Archive site, and other sites affiliated with it, are still not working for now, and there"s no word on when they might be back up and running.
Less than a month ago, the Internet Archive announced a major partnership with Google. The idea was that people who used Google Search could directly find links to web pages that were stored on the Wayback Machine"s site with its "About this Result” option. Google previously supported access to earlier versions of websites in search results with its own cached pages feature. However, that feature was removed from Google Search earlier this year.
Kahle posted another message earlier this past weekend that email for the site was back up, along with "contract crawls for National Libraries".