Home / Technology / Internet Archive Fights AI Bots, Users Affected
Internet Archive Fights AI Bots, Users Affected
16 Sep
Summary
- Wayback Machine access issues stem from bot traffic.
- Protections against bots sometimes block legitimate users.
- Archive seeks to distinguish bots from human users.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is experiencing significant access disruptions, impacting users trying to view historical web pages. These issues arise from a substantial increase in automated bot traffic, which has prompted the archive to implement protective measures.
While these defenses aim to keep the service operational, they have unfortunately resulted in legitimate users being blocked. The archive acknowledges these errors and is working to resolve them, apologizing for the inconvenience. They are improving their systems to better distinguish between malicious bots and people who rely on the Wayback Machine.
Reports suggest these bots may be engaged in web scraping for AI model training. A similar incident occurred in 2023 when an AI company's data extraction efforts led to the archive briefly going offline. This situation has also led some news publishers to block the Internet Archive, fearing that archived content could be misused by AI systems.
