• They have been found to have been altering the contents of the archived articles.
• They have DDoSed a server using our browsers when we visit their site
• Wikipedia has blacklisted it
• It's DNS is banned widely

Guidance published ... asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content;

Recommended alternatives include:
Internet Archive
Ghostarchive
Megalodon

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.

ArsTechnica Source

It's a bit sad, because archive.org is unable to capture some websites that archive.is is able to.

So you either get an imperfect host that is able to capture it (with a dubious integrity record), or you have a void where some stuff cannot be archived and you end up with a void.

In these cases I still consider archive.is (etc.) to be better than nothing. Also, the fact that archive.org is based in the USA is a concern. It could be forced to censor or delete content, or even be forcibly shut down.

As opposed to all the other countries that can't censor and delete content or shut websites down?

.is uses some techniques to circumvent paywalls, whereas .org just accesses the site normally. I hope a competitor to .is will show up at some point.

They have been found to have been altering the contents of the archived articles.

In what way? (I’m not trying to start an argument or defend them; I’m just curious).

I user Firefox with a handful of extensions including Bypass Paywalls Clean, NoScript, und uBllock Origin. I seem to breeze past a lot of paywalls. I base that on threads here where people are complaining about paywalls blocking them that I don't see.

Sometimes, when a site throws a Subscribe box up to block me from reading/scrolling on the sight, I can use the uBlock element zapper to delete it and read the article. The only ones that really get me are the ones that only load a paragraph or two unless you log in.

Agreed. Being unable to get important info to people could be a bigger problem which is why I'd probably keep using them.

One example discussed by Wikipedia editors involved Jani Patokallio’s name being inserted into an Archive.today capture of a blog post that was mentioned by Patokallio in his February 2026 write-up of the DDoS incident. This blog is related to the “Nora” alias used by the Archive.today maintainer, which now appears to be the name of an actual person.

misinformation is not better than nothing if youre an idiot. dummies and noobs will take the info as fact

It's a question of the political climate in the countries. The USA is a bit extreme at the moment.

I would recommend that everyone search their own comment/post history and try to replace any archive[dot]is/ph/today links with something else.

I suspected something was off when I literally could not load any archive.is website for the past year due to infinite recaptcha loops

Compared to?

For many of the people I talk to, that can be assumed. Here, however...

A bit easier to read,

Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

I base that on threads here where people are complaining about paywalls blocking them that I don't see.

I have encountered this effect specifically with guardian.com. While i never had a paywall on that site, i often get the "paywall" comment when i post something on guardian.com.

That’s more just Google not liking you.

That’s definitely true, but I haven’t experienced it anywhere else 🤷 I can’t explain it, I was simply suspicious

Are they all ran by the same nutter?

I've found https://megalodon.jp/ to work similarly. Japanese site, and has some quirks with how large of a page it will archive before only saving a screenshot, but it works.

They have a 30 articles a month limit even if you're logged in now, at least for me

Might these things be related?
https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamous-archive-is-site/

Ironically, I had to bypass the paywall using archive.is

indeed, there are many blacklisted/non-viewable urls in the wayback machine sadly. and it really doesn't work well with dynamic js-based paged

still, .is uses actual credentials to bypass hard paywalls for many news websites, which bpc-clean can't

it's just different domains for the same service to evade dns poisoning

This sentence does some heavy lifting:

The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content;

The niche filled by archive.is is for bypassing paywalls, which is the only reason not to use the internet archive's wayback machine in the first place.

The only reason the operator of archive.is can get away with all his abuses is because most of the world can't or won't pay to have access to information required to be part of the global discussion.