The Internet Archive is fighting the digital dark ages — that also means saving the GIF pandas
From dancing pandas to under construction signs, early internet GIFs tell us something critical about digital preservation — and why the Internet Archive's fight against vanishing culture matters more than ever.
This autumn — on October 10, 2024, to be exact — the Internet Archive went dark. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which means bad actors flood a website with so much traffic it crashes, took the digital library completely offline. This left researchers, journalists and, yes, early internet GIF collectors suddenly unable to access the millions of archived webpages, books and media files stored in its collections. If the general mood these past several months has felt like the category is doomsday, then Internet Archive going offline felt like a preview of the digital dark ages. Thankfully, it got back online. But digital culture and free speech online remain under critical threat.
