Locked out of the past

Readers have been hitting walls when they try to load archived pages on the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive finally explained why.

Waves of automated traffic

Director Mark Graham says the service has been swamped by high-volume bot traffic, so the Archive put protections in front of it to stay online at all.

“The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic”

Real people get caught

Those protections are blunt. If you see a 429 error, the code for too many requests in too little time, you have been swept up with the bots.

“If that's happened to you, we're sorry, and we appreciate your patience while we work to reduce the errors”

How to get unblocked

The Archive says it is getting better at telling abusive bots from humans. If you were blocked by mistake, email info@archive.org with your OS, browser, and IP address.

AI scrapers are the suspect

The Archive hasn't named the bots, but AI training crawlers are the likely culprit. In 2023 it briefly went down under tens of thousands of requests per second from one AI company.

Collateral damage

News publishers have started blocking the Archive too, worried that archived stories become AI training fodder. The library gets squeezed from both sides.

“we are victims, if you will, collateral damage caught up in the conflict between AI companies and publishers”