The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online
The Internet Archive has brought its Wayback Machine back online "in a provisional, read-only manner" as it continues to recover from attacks that took the site down last week, founder Brewster Kahle said in a post last night. The archive.org home page points users to the now-functional Wayback Machine but notes that other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.
Kahle said it was "safe to resume" the Wayback Machine's operations, but that it "might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again." The Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature that lets users capture a webpage manually is currently unavailable. The related openlibrary.org book-preservation website was still offline today.
Founded in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive crawls the web to preserve pages that are publicly available and has captured 916 billion web pages so far. It has a staff of 150 people and also provides free access to many videos, audio files, and books (though it was recently forced to delete 500,000 books after losing a copyright case).