Russian authorities have banned the site to remove the paywall Archive.today

Paywall bypass website Archive.today and several related domains (including .is and .ph) have been blocked by Russian authorities, according to the error pages that appeared when opening its websites.

The sites appeared to be blocked as of Monday when TechCrunch visited the sites from the US East Coast.

Another site in Russian said: “Access to the Internet is restricted by the decision of the authorities,” citing the Russian government agency that oversees Internet surveillance, Roskomnadzor.

According to the list of Roskomnadzor Archive.isOfficials confirmed that “access is limited to the site,” but did not provide a reason at press time. Archive.today was not listed as illegal when TechCrunch checked.

A representative of Roskomnadzor did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions outside of business hours in Moscow.

TechCrunch was able to access the Archive site from a variety of devices and networks, and was able to maintain the website despite the apparent block. It is not known how big the block was, or who used it.

Archive.today is a popular site for archiving websites, including those hidden behind paywalls or subscription plans. Wikipedia editors he recently thought to remove hundreds of thousands of links to Archive.today, saying that they found Archive.today code used by visitors’ browsers – without their knowledge – to destroy the site of a blogger who opposes Archive.today with useless web services.

Users of the Archive.today website did not respond to a request for comment.

(h/t Ryan O’Horo on Bluesky)