The Internet Archive is back online in a read-only state after a cyberattack last week crippled the digital library and Wayback Machine. A data breach and DDoS attack forced the site offline on October 9, with a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records also stolen in recent weeks.
According to founder Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is now online again “temporarily and read-only.” “Resumption is safe, but further maintenance may be required. In this case it will be suspended again.”
While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages archived over time, you cannot currently capture an existing web page in the archive. Kahle and his team have been gradually restoring Archive.org services over the past few days, including restoring the team's email accounts and its national library crawlers. The services have been taken offline so that Internet Archive staff can review them and secure them against future attacks.
A pop-up from a suspected hacker claimed that the archive suffered a “catastrophic security breach” last week, before Have I Been Pwned confirmed that data had been stolen. The theft included email addresses, screen names, hashed passwords and other internal data for 31 million unique email accounts.
The Internet Archive outage came just weeks after Google began adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine. Google removed links to its own cached pages earlier this year. Therefore, linking the Wayback Machine in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of websites or archived pages.