Wayback Machine has drastically reduced the number of archived pages of news sites
By ForGeeks The Wayback Machine has been capturing far fewer media page snapshots since the beginning of May 2025 – a drop of 87%.
The Internet Archive is losing coverage
The Wayback Machine platform, owned by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive, stores about 500 million Web pages every day. However, as Nieman Lab found Nieman Lab, the volume of archived news sites has fallen dramatically since May 2025.
From Jan. 1 to May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine took 1.2 million snapshots of the home pages of 100 major news outlets. But between May 17 and Oct. 1, it took only 148,600. That’s an 87% drop. By comparison, CNN was archived 34,524 times in the first four-and-a-half months of the year, and only 1,903 times after mid-May.
The Wayback Machine has been archived 34,524 times in the first four and a half months of the year.
Causes and Consequences
Wayback Machine director Mark Graham attributed the decline to “a failure in several archiving projects” and a delay in indexing, “Some snapshots have not yet been added to the archive due to issues with the index structure.” The data will be available later, he said.
Nevertheless, as Nieman Lab notes Nieman Lab, a five-month delay due to technical reasons is a rare occurrence. Internet Archive cited “operational reasons,” including reallocation of resources, but didn’t disclose details.
An Internet Archive has cited “operational reasons,” including reallocation of resources, but didn’t disclose details.
Financial and technical difficulties
The organization is experiencing growing difficulties. In 2023, its expenses totaled $32.7 million on revenues of $23 million. Maintaining and storing a multi-billion dollar archive requires significant resources.
In the fall of 2024, the Internet Archive experienced a major hack, with the site and Wayback Machine inaccessible for weeks.
The organization is experiencing growing difficulties in 2024, with the site and Wayback Machine inaccessible for several weeks.
Why it matters
Since the late 1990s, the Internet Archive has served as a digital repository of historical data. Today, it is news sites – not newspapers – that have become the primary source for chronicling events. Sharp reductions in archiving volumes are jeopardizing the completeness of the digital historical trail.
