Status Update: November 19, 2024, 14:30 EST
BHL services, including page viewing and custom PDF generation, have been fully restored.
Why weren’t page images loading in BHL?
BHL serves its page images directly from the Internet Archive, our digitization partner. Outages affecting archive.org directly affect the availability of BHL materials.
What happened to archive.org?
Starting on October 8, archive.org and the Internet Archive experienced a significant cyber attack, resulting in a systems outage, defacement of the website, and in a separate incident, a breach of user data. For security reasons, the Internet Archive chose to take its sites and services offline to focus on securing, prioritizing, and preparing systems to be restored incrementally. Visit the Internet Archive blog for more information on the attacks.
Can I still use BHL if archive.org is offline?
Many BHL services remain available even when page images are not loading.
You can:
- Search the collection
- Search for scientific names
- View or download OCR text of page images
- Download PDFs for individual articles
- View over 300,000 BHL images via Flickr
When will BHL services be fully restored?
Archive.org came back online on Monday 21 October in read-only mode. At that time, most page images were once again viewable in BHL. By 19 November, all IA servers hosting BHL content were back online. BHL services have been fully restored.
Where can I get the latest updates?
For the latest status updates on BHL services, follow @biodivlibrary.
For the latest status updates on Internet Archive services, follow their official accounts on Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon.