Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine
Stylized text saying: "INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE". The text is in black, except for "WAYBACK", which is in red.
Type of site
Archive
Founded
  • May 10, 1996 (1996-05-10) (private)
  • October 24, 2001 (2001-10-24) (public)
Area servedWorldwide (except China, Russia, and Bahrain)
OwnerInternet Archive
URLweb.archive.org Edit this at Wikidata
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Current statusActive
Written inHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its 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.[1]

Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 billion web pages at the end of 2009. As of January 3, 2024, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 860 billion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data.[2][3]

  1. ^ Kahle, Brewster (November 23, 2005). "Universal Access to all Knowledge". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on August 14, 2022. Retrieved June 5, 2022.
  2. ^ "Internet Archive: Wayback Machine". web.archive.org. Archived from the original on March 13, 2023. The current number of archived pages can be seen at the archive's home page.
  3. ^ Kahle, Brewster. "A Message from Internet Archive Founder, Brewster Kahle". Internet Archive. Retrieved January 10, 2024.