Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today Over DDoS and Tampering

Wikipedia has voted to blacklist Archive.today, a popular site for bypassing news paywalls, due to its involvement in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The decision, reached on February 21, 2026, also cited evidence that Archive.today operators altered archived web page content, raising significant reliability concerns.

This move comes after the site was used to direct a DDoS attack against a blogger. Furthermore, editors discovered that Archive.today allegedly inserted the name of the targeted blogger into altered snapshots of web pages, apparently due to a dispute over a blog post critical of the archive site's maintainer. The FBI is reportedly investigating the archive site's founder.

Over 695,000 links to Archive.today across approximately 400,000 Wikipedia pages are slated for removal. Wikipedia editors are being guided to either remove these links, replace them with archives from services like the Internet Archive, or update sources. The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is explicitly stated to be separate from Archive.today.

Discussions revealed that Archive.today's maintainer had threatened the blogger, Jani Patokallio, after he published a post discussing the archive site's potential founder. These threats, including associating the blogger with AI porn and creating a dating app under his name, were considered by Wikipedia editors. The alleged tampering with snapshots, such as inserting Patokallio's name into comments on captured pages, solidified the consensus to deprecate the site.