Wikipedia:Archive.today guidance

If you need to access archive.today, you should install a content blocking extension in your browser (such as uBlock Origin) that prevents archive.today from using your computer to send unnecessary web requests when you load its pages. Alternatively, you can temporarily block gyrovague.com in the hosts file (located at %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows, /private/etc/hosts on macOS, and /etc/hosts on Linux) on your computer by appending 0.0.0.0 gyrovague.com on a new line in the file. This will require the use of administrator or superuser permissions. When saving the file, do not append a .txt or other file extension, the file name should simply be hosts.

To highlight references with archive.today archives, copy and paste this stylesheet to your common.css user subpage:

.mw-parser-output .reference-text:has(
  a[href*="//archive.today"],
  a[href*="//archive.is"],
  a[href*="//archive.fo"],
  a[href*="//archive.ph"],
  a[href*="//archive.md"],
  a[href*="//archive.vn"],
  a[href*="//archive.li"]
) {
	background: var(--background-color-error-subtle, #ffe5e5);
}

In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service attack against a blog.^[2] This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog's ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 22 February 2026^[update].^[3] Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived web pages.^[4] It was also later discovered that this was not the first DDoS attack Archive.today has performed.

Archive.today is an archive site capable of archiving some websites that no other current archive sites can reliably handle. Before being deprecated, it was linked nearly 700,000 times on English Wikipedia (see #Stats section below). In addition to the DDoS attack and deceptive archive modifications, there is concern about its long-term viability. These concerns were discussed in a request for comment that started on 7 February 2026 and was closed on 20 February. The closing statement is below:^[5]

There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links) and remove all links to it. There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see [WP:ELNO#3]). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable. Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability. However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.

As of 15 February 2026^[update], English Wikipedia had 689,987 links, of which 567,260 are unique, located in 364,142 pages. Stats automatically refresh each month on the 15th.