The web's memory lives inside a former church in San Francisco
Since 2009 the Internet Archive has had its headquarters at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a building that was once a Christian Science church. From there a non-profit founded by Brewster Kahle keeps the Wayback Machine running, and in October 2025 it celebrated its first trillion archived web pages.
Kahle started the Archive in May 1996 with Bruce Gilliat, taking snapshots of a web that was growing at speed, while he also ran the commercial crawling firm Alexa Internet. The oldest page it holds is a December 1996 edition of USA Today. The public gained easy access in 2001 through the Wayback Machine, and most of its material is still gathered automatically by crawlers trying to save as much of the open web as possible.
Collections soon widened to films, texts, audio and software, starting with the Prelinger Archives in 1999, and the Archive runs Open Library, a catalogue anyone can edit. Much comes by donation: hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm records from Boston Public Library, 250,000 books from Trent University, and an entire college library after Marygrove College closed. Books still under copyright are lent to one reader at a time, a practice that four large publishers challenged in court in 2020.
Keeping it all is a physical job. In 2016 about 20,000 hard disks held roughly 30 petabytes of unique data, stored as paired copies in separate data centres but without routine backups. Copies now sit far away too, including at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam, and a Vancouver copy exceeded 145 petabytes by 2024. After Kahle announced a Canadian backup in November 2016, many read it as a response to the incoming Trump presidency.
California formally recognised it as a library in 2007. In October 2024 attacks, defacement and a data breach knocked it offline, with full service back by October 25.
Source: Internet Archive
