gg2
Wayback Machine access update
The gist
The Internet Archive said the Wayback Machine was hit by high-volume automated traffic.
Those bot defenses also caught real users, so the archive explained the access changes.
How it unfolded
- Sep 11, 2026The Internet Archive's announcements page reports the 2024/2025 crawl is complete, with petabytes of material available for bulk download and playback via the Wayback Machine, including two million videos captured as part of the End of Term effort for the first time at this scale.
- Sep 15, 2026The Internet Archive publishes a blog post titled "An Update on Wayback Machine Access" and posts the same update on Instagram.
- Sep 15, 2026The post is submitted to Hacker News, receiving 6 points, and PCMag reports the Internet Archive published the post addressing user complaints about Wayback Machine access issues.