Wikipedia editors have resolved to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that has been cited more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia, citing concerns about reliability and alleged malicious activity. The decision followed discussions on the platform’s internal pages where editors reached a consensus to immediately deprecate the service, add it to the spam blacklist and begin removing existing links as soon as practicable. The development was first reported by Ars Technica.
Archive.today, which also operates under domain names such as archive.is and archive.ph, has been widely used by internet users to access content hidden behind paywalls and to preserve web pages that might later be altered or deleted. Its utility made it a common citation tool on Wikipedia. However, editors noted that the service had previously been blacklisted in 2013 before being removed from the blacklist in 2016, and said fresh concerns had prompted a renewed review of its status.
Central to the controversy are allegations that the site used visitors’ browsers to execute distributed denial of service attacks, commonly known as DDoS attacks, and that some archived pages may have been altered.
According to discussions among Wikipedia editors, the encyclopedia should not direct readers to a website accused of hijacking users’ computers to generate traffic aimed at a specific target. Editors also cited evidence suggesting that content on certain archived pages had been modified, raising questions about the integrity of the archive.
The alleged DDoS incident involved blogger Jani Patokallio, who wrote that beginning January 11, users loading Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page were unknowingly executing JavaScript that sent repeated search requests to his Gyrovague blog. Patokallio, who had previously examined the ownership of Archive.today in a 2023 blog post and described it as opaque, said he later received requests from the site’s webmaster to temporarily remove his post. After declining, he alleged that the communication escalated into threats. Wikipedia editors pointed to archived snapshots that appeared to insert Patokallio’s name into web pages, reinforcing concerns about the archive’s reliability.
In response to the decision, guidance on Wikipedia now instructs editors to replace Archive.today links with original source links or alternative archives such as the Wayback Machine. On a blog associated with Archive.today, the site’s apparent owner defended the service, arguing that its value to Wikipedia lay in helping manage copyright exposure rather than bypassing paywalls, and indicated an intention to scale down the alleged DDoS activity. The owner also criticised media coverage of the dispute, suggesting that journalists had amplified aspects of the controversy without broader context.