May 12, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Delete History
Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to Keep Wayback Machine
Readers are furious as news giants lock their stories away from internet history
TLDR: Major news outlets are blocking the Wayback Machine, and a petition wants them to reverse course so important reporting isn’t lost. In the comments, people are split between offering a 30-day compromise and bluntly saying blocked outlets deserve to lose readers.
The internet’s memory just got messier, and the comments are absolutely not calm. A new petition is calling on The New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today to let the nonprofit Internet Archive keep saving their articles in the Wayback Machine — the online time capsule people use to check old pages, track edits, and preserve reporting. The publishers say they’re worried about artificial intelligence scraping content. Critics say that excuse sounds flimsy when the result is that important journalism becomes harder to verify, revisit, or remember.
But the real fireworks are in the community reaction. One camp went full "fine, let them burn", arguing that if big legacy outlets want to block archiving, readers should simply stop reading them and let their traffic collapse. Another crowd pushed a compromise: make stories available to the archive after 30 days, like a delayed release, so publishers keep some control without wiping themselves out of the historical record. There was also a mini panic attack when one commenter admitted the title made them think the Wayback Machine itself was dying — only to shrug and say if archives stop working, they’ll just stop clicking those outlets altogether.
The sharpest irony? Commenters kept circling back to the same point: the Internet Archive is being punished for playing fair and respecting website rules, while less respectful copycats and data grabbers can just ignore them. In other words, the nice guy finishes last — and the comments section is roasting everyone about it.
Key Points
- •The article is a petition urging major media outlets to work with the Internet Archive so their journalism remains preserved in the Wayback Machine.
- •It states that the New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today are among outlets whose work is no longer being preserved there.
- •The petition says the New York Times told the Internet Archive in February to stop preserving its journalists’ work.
- •It cites reporting that USA Today has relied on Wayback Machine-supported reporting while blocking archiving of its own content, and says The Atlantic’s CEO responded publicly without committing to a solution.
- •The article argues that preserving news in the Wayback Machine supports fact-checking, historical recordkeeping, and resilience against censorship or pressure to remove stories.