English-language Wikipedia bans Archive.today after editors discover it was used to direct a DDoS attack and tampered with snapshots; 695K+ links to be removed
The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct …
Ars TechnicaJon Brodkin
Context & Ripple Effects
Wikipedia has previously acted on source-quality concerns, including its move to restrict Daily Mail citations when editors judged the outlet generally unreliable. This case extends that governance role from evaluating publishers to evaluating the integrity and security of citation infrastructure.
The related coverage also shows scrutiny reaching how content is produced, through limits on AI-written article drafting. Together, these actions center verifiability and policy compliance at several points in Wikipedia’s editorial workflow.
First-order effects
English Wikipedia must remove or replace more than 695,000 Archive.today references, creating a large citation-maintenance task for editors and affected articles.
Archive.today loses a major source of inbound references after editors tied the service to DDoS direction and altered snapshots, making its links unusable on the site.
Second-order effects
Editors and maintenance tools will need to assess whether replacement archive links are both accessible and faithful to the original material, not merely available.
Other archival services may see demand for replacement citations, while facing greater pressure to demonstrate snapshot integrity and resistance to abuse.
Third-order effects
Archive links are increasingly likely to be treated as evidentiary infrastructure subject to provenance and security standards, rather than as neutral backups for citations.
If this pattern continues, Wikipedia’s sourcing rules will more explicitly encompass the technical behavior of intermediaries alongside the reliability of original publishers.
The trend: Wikipedia is tightening trust controls across sources, archives, and content-production tools as failures in any layer can undermine verifiability.
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links | If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links | If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.
One thing I find interesting about this story is the response from tech solutionists (to wit: “what if we implemented a new archiving app using tech stack xyz"), when none of the problems at play here are technical ones but social organizatinal ones. [embedded post]
This is wild. Stop using archive.today and archive.is immediately. They're altering their screenshots and running DDOS attacks based on personal grudges! Remarkable reporting from @arstechnica.com. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ... (as always, @archive.org is still great, love…
In light of recent revelations that Archive(dot)today is involving its users in a DDOS attack, and altering archives to further a personal grudge, I am ceasing use of the site. — I also did three quick tests of alternatives for on-demand archiving, summarized below... arstechn…
yeah archive dot {today, is, whatever} is totally hosed and unreliable... if you've been using it, would be a good time to find an alternative. Unfortunately, I don't know what that alternative is (besides Wayback Machine?). arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ...
The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack. — arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ...
For all my #OSINT peeps, archive [dot] today has been DDOSing a blog and is using its visitors as unwilling participants in this attack. Read about it here (arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ...) and from this blog gyrovague.com. — And consider removing this archiving tool from you…