Wayback Machine Hit by Bot Traffic, Users Caught in Crossfire
Original: An Update on Wayback Machine Access
Why This Matters
The Wayback Machine is a primary public record of the web; availability gaps affect researchers, journalists, and archivists globally.
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine director Mark Graham confirmed on Sept. 15, 2026 that the service has been battered by high-volume automated traffic, forcing rate-limiting protections that have inadvertently blocked legitimate users with HTTP 429 errors.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been fielding waves of automated bot traffic severe enough to threaten service stability, prompting the team to deploy rate-limiting measures. The most visible sign: a rewritten error message shown when requests are blocked with a 429 'too many requests' response. Director Mark Graham acknowledged the protections are imperfect — real users are sometimes caught in the net meant for abusive bots. The Archive says it is actively improving its ability to distinguish human visitors from automated scrapers. Users who believe they were blocked in error can email info@archive.org with their OS, browser, and IP address for manual review. No timeline was given for a full fix, but Graham described the situation as an ongoing effort to reduce false positives.