Wikipedia crashed Archive.today after a DDoS attack

Wikipedia’s editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.lero, an online archive service that claims to have been linked more than 695,000 times to the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today – which also operates under several other names, including archive.is and archive.ph – probably used more to find things that are not possible behind paywalls. This also makes it useful as a Wikipedia citation resource.

However, according to Wikipedia page for a discussion of the topic“There is an agreement to stop archiving archive.today, and, as soon as possible, add it to the banned spam list (…) and immediately remove all links.” (Ars Technica first it said about the election.)

The discussion site says Archive.today was previously published in 2013, but was removed from the blacklist in 2016.

Why change the way again? Because, the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers to a site that hacks users’ computers to perform DDoS attacks.” In addition, “evidence has been provided that users of archive.today have modified the content of the archived website, making it unreliable.”

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that as of January 11, users who uploaded the old CAPTCHA page have been blocked. Loading and executing JavaScript unknowingly which sends a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an attempt to get Patokallio to listen and increase his hosting bill.

Back in 2023, Patokallio published blog post is reviewing Archive.today, whose ownership has been described as “an obscure mystery.” And although he couldn’t track down the owner, he confirmed that the site was “a labor of love for one person, run by a talented Russian and access to Europe.”

Recently, Patokallio said that the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to cancel the project for two to three months.

“I don’t care about this post, but the problem is: journos from many media (Heise, Verge, etc) cherry-pick a few words from your blog, then make a completely different story with your post as the only known source; then they refer to each other and produce negative results to be given to the public,” said the administrator of the website, according to Emails shared by Patokallio.

Patokallio said that when he refused to download it, the webmaster responded with “escalating threats.”

Wikipedia editors as well he pointed to the pictures of the pages in the Archive.today that seems to have been changed to include Patokallio’s name – hence the concern that it has “become unreliable” as a repository.

Wikipedia is instructions now calls on editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or other archives such as the Wayback Machine.

Get started it’s a blog linked to the website Archive.today, who appears to be the owner he wrote that Archive.today the value of Wikipedia was not “payments” but “the ability to download copyright issues.” They later he wrote that things have become “very good” and that they have “reduced ‘DDoS’.”

“Why haven’t you written about such incidents before, people in the tabloids?” they said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who will read you, but there were a lot of games, right?”