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The Internet Archive is under attack, with a popup claiming a ‘catastrophic’ breach

An image showing a laptop with “Error” notifications on the screen
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

When visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. After closing the message, the site loaded normally, albeit slowly.

However, as of 5:30PM ET, the popup was gone, but so was the rest of the site, leaving only a placeholder message saying “Internet Archive services are temporarily offline” and directing visitors to the site’s account on X for updates.

Here’s what the popup said:

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”

HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or…

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