An Update on Wayback Machine Access

We’ve heard you: “Fix the Wayback Machine!”

Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error — the HTTP code that means “too many requests.”

Those protections sometimes catch real people by mistake. If that’s happened to you, we’re sorry, and we appreciate your patience while we work to reduce the errors.

We’re getting better at telling abusive bots apart from the people who depend on the Wayback Machine every day. If you think you were blocked in error, email info@archive.org with your operating system, browser, and IP address, and we’ll look into it.