It’s unclear what’s causing the coverage shortage. Apparently “various operational reasons” involving “resource allocation” has spurred the delay in showing some archived material.
For some reason, the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive’s well-known web snapshotting operation, appears to be enduring a recession of sorts. The project, which relies on web crawlers to catalog changes to a vast number of sites on the web, has been a staple of the internet age, and a key way to conduct research—journalistic or otherwise. Unfortunately, a new report from Niemen Lab claims that the Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news media websites have been “plummeting” in recent months. Indeed, the outlet reports:
Between January 1 and May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine shows a total of 1.2 million snapshots collected from 100 major news sites’ homepages.
