Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today over alleged DDoS attacks

Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia. According to a Wikipedia discussion page, there is consensus to immediately deprecate the service and, as soon as practicable, add it to the platform’s spam blacklist—a list of domains blocked from being linked on Wikipedia—and to forthwith remove all links to it.

The reversal comes after serious security and integrity concerns were raised on the Wikipedia discussion page. Specifically, the page states, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” A DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack is a cyberattack that attempts to disrupt a service by overwhelming it with traffic. Additionally, editors reported that Archive.today operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable. This is not the first time the service has faced restrictions; Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013 and was later removed from the blacklist in 2016.

The current dispute is tied to a series of events involving blogger Jani Patokallio. In 2023, Patokallio published a blog post examining Archive.today, describing its ownership as an opaque mystery. He concluded that the site is likely a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe. According to Patokallio, the Archive.today webmaster recently asked him to take down the post for two or three months. The webmaster expressed concern that mainstream media journalists would cherry-pick words from the blog to construct different narratives. After Patokallio declined to remove the post, the webmaster allegedly responded with an increasingly unhinged series of threats. The alleged DDoS activity, which reportedly began on January 11, involved executing JavaScript on Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page to target Patokallio’s blog.

In response to these developments, Wikipedia’s guidance now directs editors to remove existing links to Archive.today and replace them with links to the original source or alternative archiving services, such as the Wayback Machine. While the Archive.today operator has dismissed the severity of the allegations, the platform’s editors are moving forward with the systematic removal of the links to protect the encyclopedia’s readers and maintain citation integrity.

Why it matters

This move highlights the growing tension between web archiving services and the platforms that rely on them, specifically regarding security risks and the integrity of historical citations.