The paywall bypass website Archive.today and several of its associated domains (such as .is and .ph) have been blocked by Russian authorities, according to an error page that appears when the website loads.
As of Monday, when TechCrunch visited the website from the US East Coast, the pages appeared to be blocked.
“Access to internet resources was blocked by decision of public authorities,” the Russian-language page said, citing Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency responsible for internet censorship.
According to Roskomnadzor's Archive.is listing, authorities acknowledged that “access is limited to that page,” but did not provide a reason at the time of publication. Archive.today was not listed as blocked when TechCrunch checked.
Roskomnadzor representatives did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's inquiries outside of business hours in Moscow.
TechCrunch was still able to access the archive site from a variety of other devices and networks, and was able to archive web pages regardless of the apparent block. It is not clear how extensive the block was or who carried out it.
Archive.today is a well-known website for archiving copies of websites, including content that is usually hidden behind paywalls or subscription logins. Wikipedia editors recently decided to remove hundreds of thousands of links to Archive.today, announcing that they discovered that Archive.today's code was using web browsers without the knowledge of visitors to flood the websites of bloggers who had criticized Archive.today's operations.
The website operator behind Archive.today did not respond to a request for comment.
(Ryan Ohoro of Blue Sky)