r/WaybackMachine

TL;DR:

• If the website is so far down you see no connection, no message, no header indicating you connected, just absolutely nothing at all, then things are dire indeed. That's some serious mojo. Or your cable modem is broken.

• If the site shows what's called the "Sorry" page, a page that indicates something is wrong and to check social media for updates, you're connected to a simple server pumping out a generic message where even the graphics are embedded in the HTML to save bandwidth. Network is working, that server is working, little else is guaranteed.

• If the site is up, and seemingly browsable, but you can't upload and can't make changes to items you control, along with a few other functions, then it is in a semi-experimental "read-only" state intended to allow the maximum amount of access even the face of server room downtimes and other network/infrastructure breaks.

• If you try and reach the wayback machine, a subsite of the archive (like scholar.archive.org) and you are hit with errors or broken connections, but the rest of the site is working, then there is a code push that affected that site, or a database issue, or a range of other likely software-related problems that is taking that specific functionality down while leaving the rest intact.

• If the site works except when you try to access or work with one specific item, then that item might have been taken down, the machine that hosts copies of that item might be having issues, or there is some aspect with the item itself that is causing a bug or an operations issue.

But What Now?

Bear in mind that there's little you can actually do if you experience these outages; you are being informed about them, or can infer about them, as an end user. But no amount of changing browsers, providers, VPNs or settings is going to shift the needle too much for these issues. It's on the Internet Archive's side.

It's natural, however, to think you are one pinball-jostle or one Fonzie-Jukebox-punch from all working great again, so users try all sorts of overwhelming or intense approaches to squeezing functionality out of the site. Sometimes the site comes back during this and the timing encourages pattern matching.

For those folks, here are actual issues that have happened over the years that have led to outages that look odd or unexpected from the surface level, mostly for the use of talismans to hold while waiting for functionality to return.

• Occasionally, a software bugfix meant to deal with a display issue on an item has caused other items to appear to be incomplete or not working, because the bugfix encountered a situation that only presented itself when in production.

• An old router has flaked up and died, and code that all rendering of pages touches passes through that router, and the systems all appear to be failing or broken, waiting for the non-functioning router to do its job.

• An anti-spam or anti-virus functionality, including a person doing anti-spam or anti-malware work, has shut down more matching items than intended, requiring some reversing of settings, which takes time.

• A user has decided to upload hundreds of thousands of items at once, utilizing a bank of machines to get around the "slowness", and in doing so, has filled up every slot of every processing channel of every aspect of the site.

• A different form of that user is a very aggressive bad actor, literally trying to take down the site.

How Bad are Bad Actors?

To the end of bad actors, it's important to note that a combination of DDOS attempts, spam runs, and AI scrapers have come at an exponentially greater rate than previous years. DDOS attempts used to be rare enough against Internet Archive that they made news. Currently, at least a dozen serious attempts to DDOS the site come every month. Sometimes it's multiples in the same day from different sources. There are processes in place to mitigate them, but they are a real situation that is ongoing.

Scrapers, scraping, and overactive agents attempting to gather everything from the Archive in the most inefficient manner possible are also indistinguishable from a DDOS attack in some cases. Word to the people who are doing without even knowing they are, but for-whatever-reason attempts to grab terabytes of random information from the Archive stacks are a source of lean on the system and can eventually cause outages.

We also have had to deal with incredibly aggressive spammers, in one case hitting the site with hundreds of clients from hundreds of locations at once in an attempt to push in their spam, and fighting that situation is ongoing. The age of agents has made it easier for them, and the fight will likely never end.

Finally, and Ironically, work done in the last couple years to increase multi-homed geographical redundancy can lead to outages as the work continues to both refine the process and handle decades of technical debt.

Filling the Notification Gap

In an ideal world, there'd be a status update page you could hard-core refresh and see if there are any known issues with the Internet Archive, along with estimates of return to service, as well as indications of trends. Internet Archive itself is not likely to be the source of that information.

The reasons are multiple, but most prominent are: the staff is very small and spread in very specific directions, and there are citeable examples where the Archive had live maps of network and machine performance and they were very much used by bad actors to attack infrastructure. When an event (like a recent power line vandalism) is pulling together employees from all over the departments to handle the results, one of those 2am-5am situations is not 100% guaranteed to have a person from a "notification team" keeping social media or web pages up to date - there are simply not enough people.

The solution, therefore, currently appears to be that users make things up. In fact, they make them up in places like Reddit where the algorithm will put a "the site is down because ____" story up again and again, making some readers understandably think they are talking about a situation that is not 4 days or 4 weeks old. So, not really a solution.

Another Possible Approach

Therefore, it is suggested here that the following assumptions should be made, and the following actions could be taken.

• Assume that the Internet Archive wishes to be up.

• Therefore, assume that if the Internet Archive is not up or not functioning, it is working to bring itself back up as soon as it can.

• Assume that if a large, ongoing, major issue is happening, that the Internet Archive will inform users within a day or two.

• Report issues with the site to patron services () with information on what you are doing and what behavior you are seeing, so they can be compiled.

• Use sites like that consolidate reports, to help verify a problem is global and not localized to a specific user.

Another Offer

It's not technically in my job description (or maybe it is), but if you're dealing with a thorny complicated problem and you want someone to look at it who can at least track down some sort of answer, I'll take e-mails at . I'm not an alternate court and I'm not a judge, but I can help people who are in need.