Is Archive.org Down? How to Check and What to Do
If archive.org is not loading, you are probably not the only one noticing. The Internet Archive experiences outages more frequently than most large websites — sometimes planned maintenance, sometimes infrastructure issues, and occasionally something more serious. Here is how to figure out what is happening and what to do about it.
Check if it is actually down
Before troubleshooting on your end, confirm the problem is not local. Downdetector (downdetector.com) and Is It Down Right Now (isitdownrightnow.com) aggregate user reports and show whether archive.org is experiencing widespread issues. If hundreds of people reported problems in the last hour, it is not your connection.
You can also try loading archive.org in a different browser, on your phone's mobile data (not Wi-Fi), or through a VPN. If it loads on one network but not another, the issue is routing or DNS on your end, not the Archive itself.
Common causes of downtime
Planned maintenance. The Archive announces scheduled maintenance on its blog and Twitter/X account. These are usually short — a few hours — and happen during US off-peak hours.
Infrastructure strain. The Archive runs on a comparatively modest setup for the traffic it handles. High-traffic events — a viral link, a major news story referencing archived content, or a bulk-download surge — can slow or temporarily take down parts of the service.
DDoS attacks and security incidents. The October 2024 cyberattack took the Archive offline for weeks and affected service quality for months afterward. While the Archive has hardened its infrastructure since then, it remains a target, and security-related outages do happen.
DNS issues. Occasionally the problem is DNS resolution rather than the Archive's servers. Switching your DNS to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google) can resolve these cases quickly.
What to do while it is down
Use cached versions. If you need a specific page that was on the Wayback Machine, try Archive.today (archive.ph) — it may have an independent snapshot. Memento Time Travel (timetravel.mementoproject.org) searches multiple archives at once and may find the page in a national web archive.
Check Google or Bing cache. For recently viewed pages, a search engine cache might still have a copy. Search for the URL in Bing and look for the cached version link.
Wait and retry. Most Archive outages resolve within a few hours. If you are in the middle of a download, the ia CLI and wget -c will resume where they left off once the service comes back — no need to start over.
Check the Archive's status channels. The Internet Archive posts updates on its blog (blog.archive.org) and on Twitter/X (@internetarchive). For real-time community reports, Reddit's r/InternetArchive often has threads within minutes of a major outage.
The Archive's occasional downtime is one reason it helps to keep your research organized. Arkibber lets you search and build collections when the Archive is up, so when it goes down you already know what you need — and can grab it as soon as service returns.