Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged browser-based DDoS

Wikipedia editors have voted to blacklist Archive.today and its mirror domains (including archive.is and archive.ph), ordering removal of roughly 695,000 existing links and adding the service to Wikipedia’s spam blacklist “as soon as practicable,” according to TechCrunch, citing the internal discussion page and earlier reporting by Ars Technica.

The stated trigger is an alleged distributed denial-of-service scheme embedded in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA flow. Blogger Jani Patokallio wrote that starting Jan. 11, visitors who loaded Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page unknowingly executed JavaScript that repeatedly sent search requests to his Gyrovague blog—an apparent attempt to drive up his hosting costs and force engagement. Wikipedia editors concluded that Wikipedia “should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack,” and also cited claims that Archive.today snapshots were altered, undermining the service as a reliable record.

Archive.today occupies a peculiar niche: it is used to preserve pages that disappear, but also to bypass paywalls and to “offload copyright issues,” as the site’s apparent owner wrote on a blog linked from Archive.today. That combination made it attractive to Wikipedia editors trying to cite sources that readers can actually open. The same characteristics also made it a legal and ethical irritant to publishers—and, now, a liability to Wikipedia’s own reputation management.

Wikipedia’s power is not just editorial; it is infrastructural. A volunteer-run encyclopedia can, with a policy tweak, demote an entire preservation layer of the web from “citation” to “spam.” That is not state censorship, but it functions as a gate on what counts as an acceptable historical record in the most-used reference work on earth.

Wikipedia’s guidance now urges editors to replace Archive.today links with the original source or alternatives such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Yet the market reality is that “the original source” is often a disappearing URL, a paywalled article, or a publisher that retroactively edits or deletes content. Wikipedia is steering readers toward a more institution-friendly archive ecosystem—one that is easier to negotiate with, easier to pressure, and, crucially, more legible to corporate and nonprofit governance.

Archive.today’s ownership remains opaque. Patokallio previously described it as likely run by “a Russian of considerable talent” with European access, and he published emails in which Archive.today’s webmaster complained that mainstream journalists “cherry-pick” his work to build narratives. After Patokallio refused to remove his post, he said the webmaster escalated into threats. The Archive.today operator later wrote that they would “scale down the ‘DDoS’,” framing the drama as a media spectacle.

For Wikipedia, the decision is presented as basic hygiene: stop linking to a service accused of abusing visitors’ browsers and altering records. For everyone else, it shows how a decentralized project can centralize power—by deciding which memory tools the public is allowed to use.