Wikipedia Nukes 695K+ Archive.today Links After DDoS Attack
English-language Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today over DDoS abuse and tampered snapshots.
Wikipedia's English-language edition is pulling the plug on Archive.today. The popular web archiving service is being blacklisted after editors discovered it was weaponized to direct a DDoS attack against Wikipedia and had tampered with archived snapshots.
The fallout is massive. More than 695,000 links pointing to Archive.today will need to be scrubbed from Wikipedia pages. That's a staggering cleanup job for volunteer editors.
Archive.today has long been a controversial player in the web archiving space. But using the service as a vector for denial-of-service attacks and manipulating cached content crossed a hard line for Wikipedia's editorial community.
The ban applies specifically to the English-language edition. Whether other language versions follow suit remains to be seen. For now, one of the internet's largest knowledge bases just severed ties with one of its most-used archival tools.