February 4, 2026
Who killed the Factbook?
Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Fans mourn, conspiracy jokes fly as CIA retires its iconic world cheat sheet
TLDR: The CIA’s long-running World Factbook—free, trusted country profiles—has been retired. Commenters are mourning, blaming budget cuts, debating agency priorities, and joking about derailed geography quizzes, underscoring how much the public relied on this once-classified, now-gone reference.
The internet’s favorite free country crib notes just got benched, and the comments are a roller coaster. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says its long-running World Factbook—once a classified booklet, later a public staple with millions of views—has sunset. Cue the chorus: “Why kill a classic?” From the practical to the paranoid, everyone’s got a take.
Nostalgia hit hard. One longtime reader reminisced about flipping through the print version in college—“before the Interwebs”—calling it the best source for fast facts on any country. Gamers felt the sting too, with one user wailing that their geography quiz just lost a trusted fact source. Others wondered if this is yet another budget-cut casualty, joking about the “printer ink finally running out” after decades of updates.
Then came the hot takes. One commenter dusted off an old debate—invoking a famous memo—to argue the CIA should split into research and operations, implying the agency lost focus by pulling the plug on a rare public good. Meanwhile, history buffs celebrated the Factbook’s glow-up from a 1960s secret dossier to a 1997 digital hit on CIA.gov, complete with 5,000 copyright-free travel photos donated by officers. Farewell, trivia bible; the community’s not done asking who—and why—pulled the plug.
Key Points
- •The CIA has sunset The World Factbook, a long-standing global reference publication.
- •The publication originated as The National Basic Intelligence Factbook in 1962 as a classified product.
- •An unclassified companion appeared in 1971, and the publication was renamed The World Factbook a decade later.
- •The World Factbook went digital on CIA.gov in 1997, drawing millions of views annually.
- •It hosted over 5,000 copyright-free photos donated by CIA officers and served a wide range of users.