Internet Archive Back Online After Cyberattack: What Happened?
After a long battle with hackers who launched a DDoS attack and breached the Internet Archive’s systems, the archive is finally back online, at least for now. Reddit users began reporting on the r/internetarchive subreddit that the archive was back online just a day ago (October 24th, 2024).
Jason Scott, a freelance archivist for the Internet Archive, shared a post on X with the caption, “Guess who’s back, back again, archive’s back, tell a friend,” referencing the infamous Eminem track Without Me.
According to a blog post from October 21st, 2024, the archive said that it’s still recovering from the cyberattacks, but the Internet Archive is back online in a read-only manner. “Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available.”
Many users on X and Reddit reported that the Internet Archive had been going offline then online again for several days. Despite this, the Internet Archive seems to be up and running in a restricted manner, but users seem to suggest that it won’t take long for the archive to go offline again.
It’s unclear as to whether the Internet Archive will go back offline again and whether hackers will continue to wreak havoc on the digital library. But I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library sharing screenshots of websites and other digital artifacts. The library was struck by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took various systems offline, including WayBack Machine, the largest digital archive of the World Wide Web, and Open Library.
Following this, users who had tried to contact the digital library received an odd email claiming to be for the “Internet Archive Team.” Instead, hackers still had access to some of the archive’s internal tools. The message the hackers sent revealed a massive data breach affecting over 31 million people, leaking user records, including email addresses, screen names, and encrypted passwords.