The Wayback Machine’s Snapshotting Operations Are Undergoing a ‘Breakdown’

For some reason, the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive’s well-known web snapshotting operation, appears to be enduring a recession of sorts. The project, which relies on web crawlers to catalog changes to a vast number of sites on the web, has been a staple of the internet age, and a key way to conduct research—journalistic or otherwise. Unfortunately, a new report from Niemen Lab claims that the Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news media websites have been “plummeting” in recent months. Indeed, the outlet reports:

Between January 1 and May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine shows a total of 1.2 million snapshots collected from 100 major news sites’ homepages. Between May 17 and October 1, 2025, it shows 148,628 snapshots from those same 100 sites — a decline of 87%. (You can see our data here.)

Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, confirmed to the outlet that there had been “a breakdown in some specific archiving projects in May that caused less archives to be created for some sites.” However, Graham added that some of websites had been archived but that it just wasn’t showing up on the website yet. “Some material we had archived post-May 16th of this year is not yet available via the Wayback Machine as their corresponding indexes have not yet been built,” he added.

Why is this breakdown occurring? That’s the big question, and it’s one the story doesn’t really answer. Graham apparently told Niemen that “various operational reasons” involving “resource allocation” has spurred the delay in showing some archived material, but apparently didn’t get any more specific than that. Graham also reportedly claimed that the cause of the archiving “breakdown” had been fixed and that the site would be making a comeback soon. Gizmodo reached out to the Internet Archive for more information and will update this story if it responds.

The Internet Archive has had its share of troubles over the past few years. Last year, the non-profit lost the appeal of a long-running copyright battle over one of its book digitization projects. Earlier this year, the organization appealed to supporters to help it in its fight against another lawsuit, this one filed by a coalition of record labels that were seeking $700 million for the org’s work of “preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records.” Yes, the “free” media concept that the Internet Archive has lived by has turned out to be quite expensive.