Business Insider via MSN: “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear. Here’s the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it’s supposed to. No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn’t work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls. Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn’t the end of days. Not by itself. The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening. And it’s getting worse. Social networks go bankrupt. Digital journalism sites close up shop. Companies pull their online products. Links rot. Files get not found. The cloud, as wags have noted, is really just “someone else’s computers.” And when clouds get turned off, not even the silver lining is left to tell the tale…”

See also: Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-17 [Washinton Post piece] Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.  The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable. The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications.  Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time.  We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure. As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks—for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend. For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.