For those not familiar with The Internet Archive, (archive.org) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

According to the Internet Archive About page, the site/non-profit was Founded in 1996, has a historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 835 billion web pages, 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million Television News Programs), over 15 million audio items (including over 255,000 live concerts), over 44 million books and texts, 4.8 million images, 1600 education items, and over 1 million software items.

The issue currently facing The Internet Archive site, is the same battle many other sites have had, known as a DDoS or Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. On its blog, Archive.Org announced that in the past few days, an unknown attacker or attackers have sent tens of thousands of fake requests every second.

We are continuing to experience service disruptions due to a recurrence of a ddos attack. We’ll post updates in this thread.

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) May 28, 2024

As explained by Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive

 “Thankfully the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days.” “With the support from others and the hard work of staff, we are hardening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”

The Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is an overload of a site. Picture the bad guys sending thousands of people to your favorite store. The people sent are not buying anything, they just stand there and take up space. If they put enough people inside your favorite store, you won’t be unable to get in and your store won’t be able to function.

That is the digital goal of the bad guys who run these DDoS attacks. They have a goal to disable or take down a website, web application, cloud service, or other online resource by overwhelming the connection with pointless connection requests. If the site or service they are targeting becomes inoperable or ceases to function, they have succeeded in their goal.

The Internet Archive team has the resources to manage and respond to these kind of issues. That isn’t always the case for small sites.

• Archive.org – Internet Archive Blog