We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?

Many web pages are disappearing, and the Internet Archive has become a central, but fragile, guardian of digital history. A Pew Research Center study found that a quarter of web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 no longer work, with 38% of pages from 2013 that Pew tried to access now dead. The Internet Archive, a San Francisco non-profit founded in 1996, holds 866 billion web pages, and its Wayback Machine stores snapshots of sites for posterity. The organisation faces a copyright appeal it lost in September, a music labels lawsuit that could cost it $400m, and a May 2024 distributed denial of service attack.