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Currently, the Wayback Machine is down – again – without proper indication “Internet Archive: Scheduled Maintenance” will take or how long it might last

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/20

For more than an hour, any page on the Wayback Machine leads to [Archive] Internet Archive: Scheduled Maintenance:

Temporarily Offline

Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.

Please check our official accounts, including Twitter/XBluesky or Mastodon for the latest information.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Edit 20251209 18:22Z:

Back then I didn’t have time to put all updates in the blog post, so I put them as a reply below the [Archive] Richard MacManus: “The Wayback Machine has been offline for the past hour or so…” – Mastodon.

Later I forgot to update this blog post, but I just bumped into the thread again, so here it is:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “RE: https://wiert.me/2025/11/2…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    This is very typical for almost all their maintenance and outages and really frustrating for their users (of which luckily more and more are donating to them).

    Plus that the title suggests the whole Internet Archive is under maintenance whereas the rest really is working pretty OK.

    A page like `status.web.archive.org` or `status.archive.org` would be a much welcomed.

    Just blogged about it: wiert.wordpress.com/?p=187822

    (Hopefully Mastodon gets backtick code formatting)

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive It …” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    It didn’t, but now that I’m back behind a keyboard, I see some social media activity by Jason Scott:

    mastodon.archive.org/@textfile

    bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com

    bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com

  3. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive The…” – Mastodon

    There is at least some progress:

    web.archive.org/save/ returns a 503
    web.archive.org/save/https://m returns a 404
    web.archive.org/https://mastod returns a 503

  4. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive Som…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    Some progress:

    web.archive.org/save/ returns 200
    web.archive.org/save/https://m returns 200 with “system is overloaded” message and no imagery on the canvas
    web.archive.org/https://mastod returns 503
    web.archive.org/https://mastod returns 503
    web.archive.org/web/*/https:// returns 200
    web.archive.org/web/*/https:// returns 200
    web.archive.org/web/2025112021 returns 503

  5. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive Som…” – Mastodon

    Some 32 hours after the outage started, the status is this:

    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/save/
    – SRY page for web.archive.org/save/https://m
    – HTTP 303, 302 and finally 200 for web.archive.org/https://mastod
    – HTTP 303, 302 and finally 200 for web.archive.org/https://mastod
    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/web/*/https://
    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/web/*/https://

    It’s slowly but steadily returning to normal behaviour.

  6. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive Als…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    Also some social media coverage yesterday:

    x.com/internetarchive/status/1
    x.com/internetarchive/status/1

    bsky.app/profile/archive.org/p
    bsky.app/profile/archive.org/p

    mastodon.archive.org/@internet
    mastodon.archive.org/@internet

    The first were at almost 8 hours after the incident started. That’s pretty late for status updates on a large outage.

    Time to get to the next appointment. Back in some 8 hours or so.

  7. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive – H…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/save/
    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/save/https://m plus a succesful archive
    – HTTP 307, 307, 302, 200, 307 and finally 200 for web.archive.org/web/2025112212
    – HTTP 303, 302 and finally 200 for web.archive.org/https://mastod
    – HTTP 303, 302 and finally 200 for web.archive.org/https://mastod
    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/web/*/https://
    – HTTP 200 for web.archive.org/web/*/https://

    Oh: interesting: stackoverflow.com/questions/20

  8. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive The…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    The appointment took way longer: got back late, did the mandatory 12 hour recovery hence the follow up only now.

    The good thing: the Wayback Machine seems to have fully recovered.

    New social media coverage some 2 hours after my coverage yesterday confirms this:

    x.com/internetarchive/status/1

    bsky.app/profile/archive.org/p

    mastodon.archive.org/@internet

    Glad things work again. Now going through my backlog of pages that need to be archived.

  9. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive Slo…” – Mastodon

    @ricmac @internetarchive

    Slowly archival times go down. From about 20 hours 2 days ago to about 6 hours now.

    [Wayback/Archive] 3102eff610756ff0.png (770×272)

Edit 20251120T1614Z: 

For a short time, some of the links didn’t redirect to the above SRY page, but now they again do. This was just a short happy period:

[Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive …” – Mastodon

@ricmac @internetarchive

There is at least some progress:

Edit 20251120T1355Z: 

[Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@ricmac @internetarchive …” – Mastodon:

It didn’t, but now that I’m back behind a keyboard, I see some social media activity by Jason Scott:

  1. [Archive] Post by @textfiles.com — Bluesky: Another power outage affected archive today.
  2. [Archive] Post by @textfiles.com — Bluesky: Still a little touch of down at the archive for the moment.
  3. [Archive] Jason Scott: “Power and networking issues are being dealt with at the archive. Your data is safe.” – Internet Archive

This confirmed the Wayback Machine outage started before 20251120T0700Z and now is taking about 7 hours.

From the first post:

As usual:

  • none of their social media accounts indicate why or progress
  • the rest of the internet archive runs fine (their SRY page really deserves a more proper title) like for instance mastodon.archive.org and archive.org

Just see their referenced social media accounts:

Same for their Wayback Machine specific socials:

A proper status.web.archive.org or status.archive.org would be a much welcomed new feature.

I’m not alone in the observation that the Internet Archive social media are dead silent. While searching if other social media accounts had been instated after my last search, I bumped into

 

--jeroen

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