Wayback Machine's archiving mysteriously plummets

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource that does exactly what it says in the nonprofit organization's name: It archives the internet. The Internet Archive is responsible for archiving around 500 million webpages per day.

However, there has been a concerning change to the platform in recent months. According to a new report by Nieman Lab, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been archiving certain websites much less lately. Even more concerning: Many of those websites are news-related.

According to the report by Neiman Lab, the Wayback Machine archived 1.2 million snapshots from 100 major news websites' homepages between Jan. 1 and May 15, 2025. Suddenly, though, in mid-May, this changed.

The Wayback Machine only took 148,628 snapshots from those same 100 news websites' homepages between May 17 and Oct. 1, 2025. That's a whopping 87 percent drop in the number of archived pages between the first four months of the year and the preceding five months.

CNN's homepage, for example, was archived by the Wayback Machine 34,524 times between Jan. 1 and May 15. Only 1,903 snapshots of the homepage since then are in the Wayback Machine.

Mashable reported in July that, thanks to a new designation by California Senator Alex Padilla, the Internet Archive will join a network of more than 1,000 libraries around the country tasked with archiving government documents for public view.

Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, told Nieman Lab that "a breakdown in some specific archiving projects in May ... caused less archives to be created for some sites." According to Graham, some of the missing snapshots have just not had their index structure built yet and would be added to the Wayback Machine archive soon. 

As Nieman Lab pointed out, a five-month delay due to index issues is uncommon. According to Graham, the Internet Archive has been experiencing delays due to "various operational reasons" such as "resource allocation." The Internet Archive did not specify or provide any more information to Nieman Lab about the issue.

Newspapers have long been archived for the historical record. However, in the age of the internet, most newspapers, aside from the legacy media giants, have largely gone unarchived recently. News media websites have taken their place as the historical record. And, since 1996, the Internet Archive has taken up the responsibility of storing those webpage archives.

However, the nonprofit has seen difficulties in recent years. As Nieman Lab reports, the Internet Archive's 2023 expenses were $32.7 million. It takes a lot of resources to not only crawl the internet but store the data too. The nonprofit only brought in $23 million in revenue that same year.

In addition, the Internet Archive fell victim last October to a huge data breach which took the site, along with the Wayback Machine, offline. It took weeks for the site to be fully restored.