I can confirm that the Internet Archive's whole archived-books collection was throwing errors for me yesterday (2025-11-19), and today, while it's ostensibly back up, certain tranches of material are no longer available. For example, these six issues of the Saturday Evening Post from October–November 1925 are no longer available. (I focus on these because they're the ones in which John Philip Sousa's memoir "Keeping Time" was serialized, so I have their URLs handy. I suspect that there's nothing special about these six and really the entire collection of the Saturday Evening Post is lost.)
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...
Also these books which existed as recently as a year ago (detected by following hyperlinks from some of my transcribed works: I'd say no more than 1 in 10 is lost now, but still, it's disturbing that any are lost):
- https://archive.org/details/vidademigueldece00pell
- https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora02boiauoft — this was Volume 2 of "Orlando Innamorato." Meanwhile Volume 1 remains available: https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora01boia
Archived-book searches right now (2025-11-20 about 12:30pm New York time) are failing with "Error details: backend_request search: The search backend encountered an exception (the FTS API request failed, the error reported was: HTTP 502)".
Reports of as-yet-unexplained losses in various areas of the archive:
- (3:48am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442021/why-my-newspaper-scans-were...
- (8:46am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442036/maigret-removed
https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11558834128070... (2025-11-21 10:15am New York time) "We are back. Our provider found and repaired a fiber issue last night and traffic has returned. We are sorry for the disruption."
Found this post after getting the same "sry" page when trying to access IA.
danielfalbo•2mo ago
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IG_Semmelweiss•2mo ago
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danielfalbo•2mo ago