Wikipedia blacklists archiving service Archive.today following suspected DDoS attack



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All links to Archive.today, a web archive service that has been linked to as a source more than 695,000 times in Wikipedia articles, have been removed due to

a DDoS attack by the Archive.today operator.

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Archive.is RFC 5 - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5#



Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/wikipedia-blacklists-archive-today-after-alleged-ddos-attack/

Archive.today is an archive service operated under multiple domains, including ' archive.is ' and ' archive.ph, ' and is widely used as a means of accessing paid content protected by paywalls . To date, Archive.today archives have been used as citation sources in many Wikipedia articles.

According to Wikipedia editors, Archive.today uses advanced scraping techniques and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive .

However, due to concerns about the way the botnet link spam site was operated, Archive.today was blacklisted by Wikipedia in 2013. This decision was then reversed in 2016, and the Archive.today archive is now available on Wikipedia again. At the time of writing, more than 400,000 pages contain more than 695,000 links to Archive.today.

Webpage archive
https://archive.is/



In January 2026, an administrator of Archive.today injected malicious JavaScript code into Archive.today to launch a DDoS attack against Gianni Patokalio's blog ( gyrovague.com ). The editor explained that this meant that every time a user encountered a CAPTCHA page, their internet connection was used to attack 'gyrovague.com.'

The editors expressed their concerns, saying, 'This clearly raises serious concerns about the safety of our readers and the long-term stability and integrity of the service. The JavaScript code that causes this issue remains on the website.'

However, some people expressed opposition to removing links to Archive.today, fearing that it could undermine the verifiability of Wikipedia pages. It also seemed that many people believed that Archive.today would be more difficult to censor than other archive sites.

However, as of February 19, 2026, the malicious code was still active on Archive.today, and Wikipedia strongly recommended not accessing Archive.today without blocking network requests to 'gyrovague.com' to avoid contributing to the attack.



Following this discussion, Wikipedia has agreed to immediately remove links to Archive.today on February 20, 2026 local time. They will add links to Archive.today to their spam blacklist as soon as possible and remove all existing links. Wikipedia explained the decision by saying, 'There is

strong consensus that readers should not be directed to websites that hijack users' computers and launch DDoS attacks .'

Additionally, evidence has been presented that Archive.today's operators are falsifying the content of archive pages, making them less trustworthy. Those in favor of maintaining the status quo have primarily argued that Archive.today is useful for verifiability, but analysis of existing links has shown that its uses are largely replaceable, and so links to Archive.today have been removed.



The reason why Patokalio's blog, gyrovague.com, was attacked by the Archive.today operator was because he published a blog about the owner of Archive.today in 2023. In his blog, Patokalio speculated that Archive.today was likely run by a 'talented Russian with extensive access to Europe, lovingly run alone.'

Patocario recently revealed that he had been asked by Archive.today's administrators for the past two to three months to remove the blog post in question. The administrators of Archive.today explained to him, 'The post itself is fine, but the problem is that journalists from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc.) are taking just a few words from your blog, using your post as the sole source to create completely different stories, quoting each other, and presenting a terrible result to a wider audience.'

When he refused to remove the pages, the Archive.today administrators began making increasingly 'outrageous threats,' Patocario explained. Around the same time, Wikipedia editors noticed that snapshots of Archive.today's web pages had been altered to insert Patocario's name, and they expressed concern that Archive.today had become 'unreliable as an archive,' which led to the current situation.

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in Web Service,   Security, Posted by logu_ii