Wayback Machine
Type of site | Archive |
|---|---|
| Founded |
|
| Area served | Worldwide (except China and North Korea) |
| Owner | Internet Archive |
| URL | |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python |
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.
The name is a reference to the fictional time-traveling device of the same name from the animated cartoon The Bullwinkle Show from the 1960s. In a segment of the cartoon entitled "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters Mister Peabody and Sherman use the "Wayback Machine" to travel back in time to witness and participate in famous historical events.
The Wayback Machine's earliest archives go back at least to 1995, and by the end of 2009, more than 38.2 billion webpages had been saved. As of October 2025, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 1 trillion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data.