Internet Archive DDOS Attack Impacts GPO PURLs

The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit digital library offering millions of free books, movies, and audio files, plus billions of saved web pages in the Wayback Machine. GPO links to some IA content in catalog records through use of Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs). When a user clicks on a PURL, they are redirected to wherever the content currently resides or is hosted. These persistent links are found in GPO catalog records. Libraries that use PURLs or GPO catalog records have minimal link maintenance to perform in their local catalog records because GPO manages where GPO PURLs redirect.  

The IA is currently recovering from multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. This temporary interruption impacts 14,696 PURLs found in GPO catalog records, whose links redirect users to content hosted by the IA. 

PURLs in GPO catalog records pointing to IA-hosted content include: 

1. 5,059 links pointing to wayback archive (GPO’s FDLP Web Archive).
2. 1,169 links pointing to the web archive website.
3. 7,769 links pointing to webharvest website.
4. 699 links pointing to the Archive-It website. 

Additionally, there are 1,043 PURLs pointing to webarchive.loc.gov, which is content acquired by the Library of Congress from IA. These links appear to be working at present, but GPO noted that they were also temporarily down. 

The IA is posting information and updates on the DDOS attacks on their communication channels.

In particular, they have indicated that the IA data is not corrupted; however, they have suspended services while they upgrade their internal systems.  

When the IA resumes services, GPO expects that PURLs will work again without libraries needing to do anything or perform any catalog record maintenance. 

GPO will update the FDLP community about the status of PURLs linking to IA content as more information becomes available.