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’s editors have previously used source and account-level restrictions to protect the project’s reliability, including action against hundreds of black-hat editing accounts and discouraging links to the Daily Mail when stronger sources were available. The Archive.today decision extends that governance logic from publishers and contributors to a piece of citation infrastructure.
The move also sits alongside a later English Wikipedia restriction on AI-written and AI-rewritten articles, reflecting a common concern: content and tools used in the encyclopedia must remain reviewable under its core policies.
First-order effects
English Wikipedia will blacklist Archive.today and undertake removal or replacement of more than 695,000 existing links, creating a substantial citation-maintenance workload for editors.
Archive.today loses a major distribution and reference channel on English Wikipedia after findings involving DDoS direction and altered snapshots undermined its suitability as an archive source.
Second-order effects
Editors will need to locate alternative accessible copies for citations, increasing reliance on other archive services and on original publishers where those pages remain available.
Archive providers seeking Wikipedia usage face greater pressure to demonstrate both snapshot integrity and that their services cannot be used to facilitate attacks.
Third-order effects
If similar actions recur, citation archives may be treated less as neutral utilities and more as trusted infrastructure subject to reliability and security scrutiny.
Wikipedia’s volunteer governance model is broadening its quality controls beyond article prose to the systems that preserve, verify, and link supporting evidence.
The trend: Wikipedia is tightening trust controls across contributors, content-generation tools, sources, and archival infrastructure as each can affect the verifiability of its record.
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]
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…
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…
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…
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/ ...
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.
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links: the anonymous creator used the archiving site to DDOS a blogger and tampered with screenshots to hide their identity https://arstechnica.com/tech- p...
The detail here about archive dot is and its other domains altering webpages because of a grudge is worth knowing. Not to mention running a DDoS attack, obviously. Yikes. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ...
i knew the archive. today guy was weird but i didn't realise he was a frothing nutter arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ ... annoying it's often the only practical option
For those not seeing my boosts, another important article: archive.today (also archive.ph, archive.is, ...) are altering the pages they archive. Read the whole thing. — (Note: archive.org is unrelated and is great!) — https://arstechnica.com/...