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{{For|help citing the Wayback Machine in Wikipedia|Help:Using the Wayback Machine}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2025}}
{{Use American English|date=April 2025}}
{{Infobox website
| name = Wayback Machine
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The '''Wayback Machine''' is a [[digital]] [[archive]] of the [[World Wide Web]] founded by the [[Internet Archive]], an [[501(c)(3) organization|American nonprofit organization]] based in [[San Francisco]], [[California]]. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Founders [[Brewster Kahle]] and [[Bruce Gilliat]] developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Kahle |first=Brewster |date=November 23, 2005 |title=Universal Access to all Knowledge |url=https://archive.org/details/SDForumBK |archive-date=August 14, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220814164546/https://archive.org/details/SDForumBK |access-date=June 5, 2022 |website=[[Internet Archive]]}}</ref>
The Wayback Machine's earliest archives go back at least to 1995, and by the end of 2009, more than 38.2 billion webpages had been saved. As of November 2024, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 916 billion web pages and well over 100 [[petabytes]] of data.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Internet Archive: Wayback Machine |url=https://web.archive.org/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230313021854/https://archive.org/web/ |archive-date=March 13, 2023 |website=web.archive.org}} The current number of archived pages can be seen at the archive's [https://web.archive.org/ home page].</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Kahle |first1=Brewster |title=A Message from Internet Archive Founder, Brewster Kahle |url=https://archive.org/donate |website=Internet Archive |access-date=January 10, 2024}}</ref>
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In May 2021, for Internet Archive's 25th anniversary, the Wayback Machine introduced the "Wayforward Machine", which allows users to "travel to the Internet in 2046, where knowledge is under [[siege]]".<ref>{{Cite web|title=Internet Archive 25th Anniversary – Universal Access to All Knowledge|url=https://anniversary.archive.org/|access-date=January 13, 2022}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Wayforward Machine • Visit the future of the internet|url=https://wayforward.archive.org/|access-date=January 13, 2022|website=Way Forward Machine}}</ref>
On July 24, 2025, Senator [[Alex Padilla]] designated the Internet Archive as a [[Federal Depository Library Program|federal depository library]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://blog.archive.org/2025/07/24/internet-archive-designated-as-a-federal-depository-library/|title=Internet Archive Designated as a Federal Depository Library|author=Freeland, Chris|
== Technical information ==
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In March that year, it was said on the Wayback Machine forum that "the Beta of the new Wayback Machine has a more complete and up-to-date index of all crawled materials into 2010, and will continue to be updated regularly. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a little bit of material past 2008, and no further index updates are planned, as it will be phased out this year."<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.archive.org/post/350738/updated-wayback-machine-in-beta-testing |title=Beta Wayback Machine, in forum |access-date=April 16, 2014 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140417082107/https://archive.org/post/350738/updated-wayback-machine-in-beta-testing |archive-date=April 17, 2014}}</ref> Also in 2011, the Internet Archive installed their sixth pair of PetaBox racks which increased the Wayback Machine's storage capacity by 700 terabytes.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://archive.org/post/353721/6th-pair-of-racks-go-into-service-over-2pb-of-data-space-used |title=Internet Archive Forums: 6th pair of racks go into service: over 2PB of data space used |website=Internet Archive |access-date=October 25, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161024144627/https://archive.org/post/353721/6th-pair-of-racks-go-into-service-over-2pb-of-data-space-used |archive-date=October 24, 2016 |url-status=live}}</ref>
In January 2013,
In October 2013,
In December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained 435 [[billion]] web pages—almost nine petabytes of data, and was growing at about 20 terabytes a week.<ref name="Arora">{{cite journal |last1=Arora |first1=Sanjay K. |last2=Li |first2=Yin |last3=Youtie |first3=Jan |last4=Shapira |first4=Philip |date=May 5, 2015 |title=Using the wayback machine to mine websites in the social sciences: A methodological resource |journal=Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology |volume=67 |issue=8 |pages=1904–1915 |doi=10.1002/asi.23503 |issn=2330-1635|doi-access=free |hdl=10.1002/asi.23503 |hdl-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions |url=https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |access-date=January 17, 2015 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091021003552/https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |archive-date=October 21, 2009}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141218203115/https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |url-status=dead |archive-date=December 18, 2014 |title=Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions |date=December 18, 2014 |access-date=December 13, 2018}}</ref>
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===Wayback Machine APIs===
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==Uses==
From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its archive. As of 2013, scholars had written about 350 articles on the Wayback Machine, mostly from the [[information technology]], [[Library and information science|library science]], and [[social science]] fields. Social science scholars have used the Wayback Machine to analyze how the development of websites from the mid-1990s to the present has affected the
When the Wayback Machine archives a page, it usually includes most of the hyperlinks, keeping those links active when they just as easily could have been broken by the Internet's instability. Researchers in India studied the effectiveness of the Wayback Machine's ability to save hyperlinks in online scholarly publications and found that it saved slightly more than half of them.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Sampath Kumar |first1=B.T. |last2=Prithviraj |first2=K.R. |date=October 21, 2014 |title=Bringing life to dead: Role of Wayback Machine in retrieving vanished URLs |journal=Journal of Information Science |volume=41 |issue=1 |pages=71–81 |doi=10.1177/0165551514552752 |s2cid=28320982 |issn=0165-5515}}</ref>
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