Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.

[5] Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in San Francisco, California,[6] in October 2001,[7][8] primarily to address the problem of web content vanishing whenever it gets changed or when a website is shut down.

[10] Kahle and Gilliat created the machine hoping to archive the entire Internet and provide "universal access to all knowledge".

[11] The name "Wayback Machine" is a reference to a fictional time-traveling device in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends from the 1960s.

[31] Through the Internet address web.archive.org,[33] users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including PDF and data compression file formats.

The Wayback Machine creates a permanent local URL of the upload content, that is accessible in the web, even if not listed while searching in the https://archive.org official website.

[38] A new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and a fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing in 2011, where captures appear in a calendar layout with circles whose width visualizes the number of crawls each day, but no marking of duplicates with asterisks or an advanced search page.

"[42] Also in 2011, the Internet Archive installed their sixth pair of PetaBox racks which increased the Wayback Machine's storage capacity by 700 terabytes.

[63] Following this, the Internet Archive changed the policy to require an explicit exclusion request to remove sites from the Wayback Machine.

[66][67][68][69] From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its archive.

Social science scholars have used the Wayback Machine to analyze how the development of websites from the mid-1990s to the present has affected the company's growth.

[18] When the Wayback Machine archives a page, it usually includes most of the hyperlinks, keeping those links active when they just as easily could have been broken by the Internet's instability.

"[71] In 2014, an archived social media page of Igor Girkin, a separatist rebel leader in Ukraine, showed him boasting about his troops having shot down a suspected Ukrainian military airplane before it became known that the plane actually was a civilian Malaysian Airlines jet (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), after which he deleted the post and blamed Ukraine's military for downing the plane.

[71][72] In 2017, the March for Science originated from a discussion on Reddit that indicated someone had visited Archive.org and discovered that all references to climate change had been deleted from the White House website.

[76] In September 2020, a partnership was announced with Cloudflare to automatically archive websites served via its "Always Online" service, which will also allow it to direct users to its copy of the site if it cannot reach the original host.

"[79] The Wayback Machine's web crawler has difficulty extracting anything not coded in HTML or one of its variants, which can often result in broken hyperlinks and missing images.

[82] An employee of Internet Archive filed a sworn statement supporting Chordiant's motion, however, stating that it could not produce the web pages by any other means "without considerable burden, expense and disruption to its operations.

Prior to the trial proceedings, EchoStar indicated that it intended to offer Wayback Machine snapshots as proof of the past content of Telewizja Polska's website.

Judge Guzman reasoned that the employee's affidavit contained both hearsay and inconclusive supporting statements, and the purported web page, printouts were not self-authenticating.

This problem can be exacerbated by the practice of submitting screenshots of web pages in complaints, answers, or expert witness reports when the underlying links are not exposed and therefore, can contain errors.

The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

[97] The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss the copyright infringement claims that Shell asserted arose out of its copying activities, which would also go forward.

[71][108][109] Since 2016, the website has been back, available in its entirety, although in 2016 Russian commercial lobbyists were suing the Internet Archive to ban it on copyright grounds.

[110] In March 2015, it was published that security researchers became aware of the threat posed by the service's unintentional hosting of malicious binaries from archived sites.

[111][112] Alison Macrina, director of the Library Freedom Project, notes that "while librarians deeply value individual privacy, we also strongly oppose censorship".

The Daily Beast removed the article after it was met with widespread furor; not long after, the Internet Archive soon did as well, but emphatically stated that they did so for no other reason than to protect the safety of the outed athletes.

[71] Other threats include natural disasters,[113] destruction (both remote and physical),[114] manipulation of the archive's contents, problematic copyright laws,[115] and surveillance of the site's users.

But I suspect almost nothing of the format in which it was delivered will be recognizable" because sites "with deep back-ends of content-management systems like Drupal and Ruby and Django" are harder to archive.

"[119] In September 2024, the Internet Archive suffered a data breach that exposed 31 million records containing personal information, including email addresses and hashed passwords.

[121][122] On October 14, the site returned online, but it remained in read-only mode until November 4, during which time "Save Page Now" was disabled, replaced with a "Temporarily Unavailable" banner.