Wikipedia Deprecates Archive.today After Its Owner Seemingly Launched a Targeted DDoS Campaign and Altered Archived Pages ⇥ arstechnica.com
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. […]
Daniel Sims, TechSpot:
Wikipedia is currently weighing three options to address the issue: retaining the status quo, removing all links, or discouraging future citations while keeping existing links. Some also argue that pivoting away from Archive.today is prudent regardless of the current dispute due to the site’s inherently precarious existence. In 2021, Archive.today’s creator admitted that it is “doomed to die at any moment.”
Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:
In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.
“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”
This apparently all started when some media organizations reporting on the FBI’s subpoena cited a 2023 post from Patokallio, in which he tried to figure out the identity of Archive.today’s owner. As he writes more recently, very little of what he found was entirely new, and it is unlikely he uncovered the owner’s true identity.
Regardless of what you think about that, using the visitors of Archive.today as digital ammunition against Patokallio’s vastly smaller blog is bad enough. But then the operator went and violated perhaps the only inviolable rule of website archiving: they modified the contents of the websites they were ostensibly preserving. It is now unreliable.