Internet Archive Website Offline for Hours

Information about the outage was experienced by the renowned Internet Archive site, which is also called the Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive, also known as The Wayback Machine, suffered an interruption at midnight eastern coast time on the 25th of August. Fans who could not access the website expressed their concern for their loved ones and gratitude for the site.

Updated The Networking Hardware Fail

A hardware failure caused the issue that affected the Internet Archive. Internet Archive was an equipment failure caused by networking hardware.

Jason Scott, an archivist, working with the Internet Archive, tweeted the reason:

“An essential component of Internet archive equipment for networking has failed, and an alternative is being sought at the moment.”

Internet Archive Down

The website displayed a message stating that the website was down.

A look at the headers on Webconfs.com’s website showed that the headers Webconfs.com website showed the website’s message to a browser that the website was sending an error message of 503 Service Temporarily unavailable Error Response.

The error message is typically displayed if the server is taken off for maintenance or the server has been overloaded and cannot respond to a web page.

Screenshot of error message from Internet Archive Home Page

Twitter Announcement

The Internet Archive tweeted shortly after midnight to inform people that their website was down.

The tweet did not specify what was wrong, just that they were working on getting the site back online.

Here’s Twitter’s tweet

Wayback Machine Fanatics World Wide Express Concern

Many people were upset, but the comments posted were more upset than concerned. Many posted messages of thanks.

IsItDownRightNow has received more than 300 comments that expressed the concern.

Some students needed the website for their studies.

Another fan was a Grateful Dead fan who posted that attempts to stream the archived Grateful Dead concerts were unsuccessful.

Comments flood into Twitter too.

What Could Go Wrong?

There was a feasibility that the site could be offline because of numerous lawsuits filed by publishers who opposed the publication of books in an accessible manner.

The error message displayed by the website suggests an issue on a server level, the root of which could be many topics.