WQYU – Blog

The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is an online digital library that allows anyone to be able to see what a website looked like in the past. While there are others very close to The Wayback Machine such as archive.is, The Wayback Machine allows a website to almost look like it is live and it also archives files unlike the others that only save the page that you see.

We often take some sites for granted and one of them is The Wayback Machine as in this case I wanted to look at a site that has been changed over the years only to discover that The Wayback Machine gives this error when trying to access the site’s URL web.archive.org.

This site can’t be reached web.archive.org took too long to respond.

Try:

• Checking the connection
• Checking the proxy and the firewall
• ERR_TIMED_OUT

When I tried to access the site and I get the error, I thought maybe I entered the URL wrong, maybe my computer got disconnected from the network, maybe my ISP is having some issue, so let me check to see if the same issue happens on a cell phone and the same error happens.

Oddly on their main site archive.org, they say nothing about any issues, so then the next place to look is on their official X account “@waybackmachine” and they do make an announcement saying they did have a power outage? While this may be true on the 16th of August, it is now the 31st of August and the site is still not loading, so is this something more than a power outage? Did this start from a power outage and is much bigger than they expected? They have not posted any new updates as of the 31st of August on X.

Dealing with a power outage.

Apologies for the disruption in service.

— The Wayback Machine (@waybackmachine) August 17, 2026