The web is decentralized and fluid by design, but all that chaos and ephemerality can make it difficult to keep a site up and online without interruption. That's what has made the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine feature so invaluable over the years, maintaining a history of long-forgotten pages. Now its deep memory will help make sure the sites you visit never go down, through a partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Since 2010, Cloudflare has offered a feature called Always On, which caches a static version of sites that it can serve to visitors in case of downtime. Always On was one of CloudFlare's original offerings; John Graham-Cumming, the company's chief technology officer, says the infrastructure powering it was due to be rearchitected. In thinking about how to modernize it, the team had an idea: Why not use the Wayback Machine, the existing crawling and caching juggernaut, to power Always On? The Internet Archive already offered an application programming interface that would make it easy for Cloudflare to pull what it needed.
"We worked with them to make sure they were OK with us using it in this way," Graham-Cumming says. "It’s one of those things where it’s like, yeah, this works for everybody, so let's do it. If you come to a website that uses Cloudflare and it’s offline, we will show the latest version that’s in the Wayback Machine archive."
The Internet Archive says it welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with Cloudflare for Always On. And the organization has recently expanded its focus on website reliability and technical integrity across the web. In February, it wayback machine cloudflare backstop
