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On Sunday, people attempting to access the Wayback Machine to view archived content from the Internet’s past found they couldn’t get the sites to work. As first reported by The Register, the sites went down following a power outage in one of their data centers.
Sorry, but a brief power outage in one of our datacenters, and then environmental factors kicking in…
means the @waybackmachine has been down and https://t.co/rvOhn0c6zM has been wobbling.
We are working on it. Sorry. More as it happens in this thread.
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) July 7, 2024
“Sorry, but a brief power outage in one of our data centers, and then environmental factors kicking in…means the @waybackmachine has been down and http://archive.org has been wobbling,” it said in a post on X. Five hours later, it replied and said it had fixed the issue. “All is good.”
The Internet Archive pointed Gizmodo to its posts on X as its official statement on the matter.
Some fans worried that the sudden disappearance of the Wayback Machine meant it was suffering another DDoS attack or had fallen prey to one of its various legal challenges. Hackers attempted to take the site down at the end of May and is currently fighting publisher Hachette in court.
But it wasn’t hackers or a publishing giant living in the past that felled the Wayback Machine. No, the reason it went down is due to something far more dangerous and deadly than a billionaire corporate empire or anonymous hackers: heat. The “environmental factors” that caused a power outage at the data center were likely a result of the heat dome currently pounding Northern California where some of the site’s data centers are located.
Temperatures reached 110 degrees in Sacramento on Saturday. It’s so hot in many parts of America that it could melt your brain. Literally. And it’s not cooling off much at night. A 2023 report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory pointed out this was a perfect scenario that could lead to data center outages.
“In the coming decades, Northern California’s drought and extreme heat risk is projected to increase significantly,” the report said. “Extreme heat can lead to increased energy use for cooling, overheating and failure of equipment, reduced efficiency, and shutdowns/outages due to heat-related power disruptions. Extreme heat can also damage the data center building infrastructure.”
Extreme heat knocking data centers offline is only going to get worse.
