In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner.
Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available.
Please note that these services will have limited availability as we continue maintenance.
Hackers disclosed archive.org email and encrypted passwords to a transparency website, and also sent emails to patrons by exploiting a 3rd party helpdesk system.
It’s big. According to Wikipedia they gained 30.5 million dollars in 2022 and have almost 170 employees - not mentioning probably hundreds of other volunteers. It sounds simple in concept but storing petabytes of data safely and maintaining complex software and hardware for it is impressive. That’s why there aren’t really any alternatives to it.
They’re also much bigger than just the wayback machine, they have multiple projects like OpenLibrary which is a goodreads alternative and scans books to read online. The IA is also under constant legal fire for archiving copyrighted materials so I bet they spent millions of dollars on that alone.