What Caused the Internet Archive Outage
A power outage at one of the Internet Archive's data centers took some services offline and degraded others on 16 August. Founder Brewster Kahle wrote that the failure came from damage to the power feed, which required PG&E — the California utility — to send crews for a physical repair rather than a remote fix.
PG&E worked alongside Archive infrastructure staff until 4 a.m. By 4:15 a.m., fans, network and servers were coming back online in sequence. Kahle's post confirmed the library was live and kicking, apart from uploads.
The organisation acknowledged the incident on X with one short line: "Dealing with a power outage. Apologies for the disruption in service."
Outage Timeline
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 15:44 EDT, 16 Aug | We detected, and complaints begin surging |
| 21:00 UTC, 16 Aug | Is It Down Checker logs a 4-hour disruption; 7 of 9 probes fail |
| 01:00 UTC, 17 Aug | Automated probes recover |
| ~04:15 local | Power restored, hardware sequenced back |
| 11:20 UTC, 17 Aug | UptimeRobot records no errors or unusual response times X |
Independent monitors and the Archive's own account place recovery at different points — expected when storage, search and upload subsystems return at different rates.
A Bad Week for Physical Infrastructure
This is the third major availability failure in five days for services the web depends on, and none of them were attacks. Namecheap lost hosting, DNS and Private Email for over 30 hours on 13 August after a storm knocked out cooling at its Phoenix datacenter. GitHub degraded Actions, API and Copilot on 17 August. The Internet Archive lost a power feed.
For a nonprofit running its own datacenters on donated funding, that exposure is structural. Commercial providers absorb these failures across regions; the Archive absorbs them in public.
What Users Should Do
Nothing. Access is restored. If an upload failed mid-outage, retry it.
