When visiting The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) on Wednesday afternoon, The Verge was greeted by a pop-up claiming the site had been hacked. After closing the message, the site loaded normally, albeit slowly.
However, as of 5:30PM ET, the popup was gone, but so was the rest of the site, leaving only a placeholder message saying “Internet Archive services are temporarily offline” and directing visitors to the site’s account on X for updates.
Here’s what the popup said:
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP refers to Have I Been Pwned?, a website where people can look up whether or…