Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack
Source: TechCrunch
Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web‑archiving service that had been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.
Archive.today—also operating under the domains archive.is and archive.ph—is widely used to access content behind paywalls, making it a common source for Wikipedia citations.
Blacklisting decision
The Wikipedia discussion page notes a consensus to “immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist … and to forthwith remove all links to it.” Ars Technica first reported the decision.
Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, removed from the list in 2016, and is now being re‑blacklisted because:
- “Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.”
- “Evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”
Alleged DDoS attack
The attack is alleged to have targeted blogger Jani Patokallio. Starting on January 11, users who loaded Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page were reportedly “unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript” that sent a search request to Patokallio’s Gyrovague blog, apparently to draw attention and increase his hosting bill. Details on Gyrovague
Patokallio’s 2023 investigation of Archive.today described its ownership as “an opaque mystery,” concluding it was likely “a one‑person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.” Original blog post
Follow‑up communications
Patokallio later reported that the Archive.today webmaster asked him to take down his post for two or three months. After Patokallio declined, the webmaster allegedly responded with “an increasingly unhinged series of threats,” as shown in emails shared by Patokallio. Email excerpts
Evidence of altered snapshots
Wikipedia editors pointed to specific Archive.today snapshots that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio’s name, raising concerns about the archive’s reliability. Evidence on Wikipedia
Updated Wikipedia guidance
The new guidance advises editors to:
- Remove links to Archive.today and its related domains.
- Replace them with links to the original source or to other archives such as the Wayback Machine. Guidance page
Statements from the site’s apparent owner
On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia was “not about paywalls” but “the ability to offload copyright issues.” Later posts indicated that the situation had “turned out ‘pretty well’” and that they would “scale down the ‘DDoS’.”