Kamal Ghorui
English-language edition of Wikipedia has reportedly banned Archive.today website after the archive site was found to direct a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against a blog. Wikipedia editors reportedly discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The Archive Today is said to have been running a DDoS (denial of service) campaign against the personal blog of engineer Jani Patokallio for over a month. Archive.today, also known as archive.is, is an archiving service similar to sites like the Internet Archive. Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive. The website is widely cited online, including on Wikipedia. In January this year, Patokallio wrote that since January 11, Archive Today has included a piece of JavaScript that makes a visitor’s browser open his blog in the background, triggering a massive DDoS attack. As for those unaware, a DDoS attack targets websites and servers by disrupting network services in an attempt to exhaust an application’s resources. The perpetrators behind these attacks flood a site with errant traffic, resulting in poor website functionality or knocking it offline altogether.
What Wikipedia says on banning Archive Today
An update on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion says: There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and to forthwith remove all links to it. There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable. Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability. However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today. The underlying reason for the DDoS attack is said to be a public spat between the Archive’s operator and Patokallio, revolving around a blog post from 2023, where the researcher looked into what makes Archive Today work well. As for what triggered the ban, Wikipedia says: ‘In January 2026, the maintainers of Archive.today inserted malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with. Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their internet connection is used to attack a certain individual’s blog. This obviously raises significant concerns for readers’ safety, as well as the long-term stability and integrity of the service. The JavaScript code which causes this is still live on the website. However, a significant amount of people also think that mass-removing links to Archive.today may harm verifiability, and that the service is harder to censor than certain other archiving sites. As of 19 February 2026, the malicious code remains active. It is highly recommended not to visit the archive without blocking network requests to gyrovague.com to avoid being part of the attack.’
