This was, it turns out, not true. And it was also something surprising: an opportunity

[shukla7789]

The Archive staff was now spending long days and nights auditing, assessing, and improving the entire infrastructure of the Archive, top to bottom. To the public, we looked completely down, and to some, waiting patiently and then less-patiently for the return of the site, they came to a conclusion: this was it.

For some people, the era of Internet Archive was over. The Wayback Machine, Open Library and the Internet Archive were, in one shocking stroke, gone.

Among the things it is very difficult to do is photo restoration service your own funeral. You don’t get to stand among the mourners and hear their thoughts, and to find out what about you mattered to them, and what difference you made over the course of them knowing you.

You don’t hear the proclamations, the dedications, the thoughts about what inspirations and warnings your life held.

But in October, we did.

There is, naturally, an entire ecosystem dedicated to taking news about sites like the Archive being down and stretching them into 30 minute presentations, and there are articles and editorials about any events of note online.

But during this period of weeks, we also got to see the conversations, statements and posts of long-time users, who otherwise would not have communicated about their relationship with the holdings and offerings they’d used for so long.


For many people, the Archive is a standard part of their browsing life – a vast and complex shelf of media and pieces of culture that they reach out to in the process of their day.

For others, it’s a critical tool in their toolbox of research, be it verifying a source for an assignment or tracking down long-otherwise-removed sources that would be near impossible if not for the Wayback Machine or the stacks within the main site.

And the amount of people who spend their days and nights walking the collections, browsing idly and finding inspiration or entertainment or relief flipping through the items, is very significant.

The inherent invisibility of the Archive, however, can’t be ignored.


It’s clear that, for many patrons, when they look for something, they search for “SOMETHING internet archive” in their search engine or go directly to archive.org to search, but the existence of a “there” related to the archive had drifted into the background. The outage had brought the bulk of our collection and presence, the depth of it, into the foreground.

In this new attention came bewilderment at the downtime, and then a protective anger.

The Archive represents a shrinking population of sites on the web – it is not “for” a company or “for” shareholders, but is run and available “for” everyone, as much as it can afford, and facing down all the challenges that come with a constantly growing site being visited by millions of patrons, daily.

As time has passed and the years have progressed, it feels like the air you breathe and the water you drink: the place you walk through on your way to knowledge.

Staring into the void of a lost Internet Archive, people took to social media and communities to be scared, bothered, worried, and angry – and for many to recognize what part it plays in many people’s lives.