Why? It’s accurate and if the owner has chosen to do this for months now, why should we ever trust they won’t again? Nobody should ever use that site and every optional filter should block them.
Regardless, another user reports the attack is still ongoing[1], so this isn't a discussion that's going to happen about archive.today anytime soon.
They've shown they're willing to deliberately weaponize their users to fight a personal dispute with someone, and didn't take corrective action when called out. Trustworthiness is something you lose and don't get back.
And since the site stores unauthorized copies of content, I don't expect any new leadership would be willing to announce much more than a pseudonym.
HN and WP and the top communities (alongside with Reddit) using AT exclusively for piracy making all the legal troubles.
Now the pirates require "apology" from a free service they abuse, threatening that they will stop pirating otherwise.
Because once the problematic content is removed it should no longer be blocked.
>It's accurate
It is neither a C&C server for a botnet, nor any other server related to a botnet. I would not call it accurate.
>Nobody should ever use that site
It has a good reputation for archiving sites, has stead the test of time, and doesn't censor pages like archive.org does allowing you to actually see the history of news articles instead of them being deleted like archive.org does on occasion.
I suppose if all the users go on the site intentionally wanting to take part in a DDoS, then sure it’s not a botnet. But that’s not reality.
Try ignoring what the payload is as it does not really matter in defining what is or isn't a botnet (though botnets typically imply malicious or sketchy payloads).
In regards to it being a DDoS it leans more in the yes direction due to the intent of it, but it also sites sending traffic to other sites is part of the web. You can embed things from other sites like images and then those others sites will fulfill those requests. The web didn't restrict pages to only send requests and load content from the same domain.
...On 20 February 2026, English Wikipedia banned links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with to insert Patokallio's name.[19] The decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability[19] while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.[20] The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[19][20]
Did AT go beyond that and manipulate any relevant part? That's rather difficult to say now. AT is obviously tampering with evidence, but so is Wikipedia; their admins have heavily redacted their archived Talk pages out of fear one of these pseudonyms might be an actual person, so even what exactly WP accuses AT of is not exactly clear.
How is that supposed to be a big deal when the one of core services archive.today provides is obviously illegal anyway?
I also think "but they also do that other crime" doesn't help their case.
It's problematic because it's childish and pointlessly degrades the user experience.
>the site has a bad reputation
Not compared to archive.org. archive.is has a much better track record.
Archive.org is awful. It allows site owners and random third parties to edit old archived pages.
Archive.today does not.
At least site owners have the copyright on the pages that Archive.org saves. They can just get the content pulled through DMCA anyway.
The operator of archive.today (presumably one, at most a handful of people) can edit archived pages on archive.today
Literally anyone can edit archived pages on archive.org.
There are literally at least hundreds of thousands of tampered archives on archive.org. How is that not worse than the couple of tampered archives on archive.today?
Do you actually mean edit or do you just mean delete
Both are problematic, but falsifying a historic record is orders of magnitude worse than deleting one, and conflating them would be extremely dishonest
Not true
>Archive.org is awful. It allows site owners and random third parties to edit old archived pages.
Also not true. However, Archive.today edits archived pages itself.