The English Wikipedia has officially blacklisted the web archiving service Archive.today, citing its involvement in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a blog and evidence of altered archived content, prompting editors to begin purging over 695,000 links across approximately 400,000 pages.
The decision stemmed from a Request for Comment (RFC) initiated on February 7, 2026, and closed on February 20, 2026, where community consensus emerged to immediately deprecate Archive.today and add it to the spam blacklist or create an edit filter to block new links. The closing statement emphasized that “there is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack” and that evidence showed Archive.today’s operators altered archived pages, rendering it unreliable.
The DDoS incident targeted blogger Jani Patokallio’s Gyrovague site, which published a 2023 investigation into Archive.today’s funding and founder’s identity, citing it in news coverage of a 2025 FBI subpoena against the site’s domain registrar Tucows. By January 14, 2026, Archive.today embedded malicious code in its CAPTCHA page to enlist visitors in attacking Gyrovague every 300 milliseconds, while its blog criticized Patokallio and emails threatened him with AI-generated pornography unless he removed the report.
Wikipedia’s guidance now specifies that Archive.today and its domains are deprecated, prohibiting new links and directing editors to remove existing ones where possible, replacing them if the original source is online and identical, or retaining if no alternative exists but noting the deprecation. A template for “new archival link needed” has been created to aid the cleanup process.
Archive.today, which handles sites other archives struggle with and bypasses paywalls, has long faced concerns about its viability and operator’s anonymity, amplified by the FBI’s 2025 subpoena seeking founder details as part of a criminal investigation.
This isn’t Wikipedia’s first such action; it previously blacklisted sites like the Daily Mail in 2017 for unreliability.
Wikipedia’s blacklist underscores growing tensions around web archiving reliability and ethics, potentially influencing how online knowledge platforms handle link rot while prioritizing trustworthy sources in an era of misinformation and cyber threats.
