Technology YouTuber Nationsquid makes video about Internet Archive tragedy

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Friday, November 15, 2024

A month after the devastating attacks on the Internet Archive in early October, YouTuber Nationsquid has a new video covering the tragedy, which rendered the site inaccessible to the public for four days, from October 10 until October 14, with “Save Page Now” unavailable for another several days.

On October 9, shortly after 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time / 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time, users who visited the site “archive.org” were greeted with a peculiar JavaScript pop-up message: "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!" Here, "HIBP" is an abbreviation for "Have I Been Pwned," a site that allows users to look up their emails to check if their credentials have been stolen or compromised. Minutes after that, the site went down for several hours due to distributed denial-of-service (DDOS for short) attacks. Public access to the site returned briefly, but due to repeated DDOS attacks, the site went down again at 08:22 UTC on Thursday, October 10. Access was restored on Monday, October 14 after four days, albeit in read-only mode, meaning users could view existing snapshots and files, could not use the “Save Page Now” tool to make new ones. This created a weeklong gap between captures, even for popular sites like Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube. No snapshots of any web page were made during the ordeal, at least not through “Save Page Now.”

Nationsquid, who has accumulated 64 million views on his channel since he joined YouTube back in July 2013, makes videos about significant events in the history of technology such as television and Internet. This isn’t the first time he covered a recent event (“recent” relative to when the video was posted). Back in July, the Crowdstrike outage wreaked havoc on the economy on July 19, causing 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers to crash. Less than a week later, on July 25, Nationsquid uploaded a video about it, titled, “How An Update Destroyed The Economy.” Nationsquid has also covered the following events:

2005: The MySpace Theft. In October 2005, a 19-year-old man named Samy Kamkar decided to pull a practical joke on his MySpace page to get a laugh out of his friends. Unfortunately, the practical joke went too far, as Samy had unknowingly created a virus that affected over 1,000,000 users. The resulting computer worm led to the site shutting down.
2006: Goggle. In 2006, you had to be careful when typing the URL for Google. If you messed up on the third letter and typed “goggle” instead, you were taken to a typosquatting site that downloaded tons of malware without your knowledge or permission, rendering your PC unusable.
February 26, 2008: Username 666. On February 26, 2008, a video was uploaded about a suspended YouTube user by the name “666.” This number is often feared in Christianity due to it being given by Revelation 13:18 as the “number of the beast.” In pop culture, this number is associated with the Devil. According to the February 2008 video, legend has it that if you visit “www.youtube.com/666” and repeatedly refresh the page, the screen eventually turns red and scary, and the X button on your browser no longer works, leaving you stuck on that page indefinitely. The urban legend is just that: a myth, an urban legend.
- Since 2008 was a long time ago (16 years ago), and web archiving of YouTube was much less of a priority back then, 2006 through 2009 have relatively little archived information compared to 2013 and later. “Evolution of Dance,” which in 2006 was the most viewed video on the site, was posted on April 6, 2006, but it had zero snapshots until June 2, 2006, at the age of two months. Modern popular videos (2016 or later) are usually saved hours or even minutes (!) after they are uploaded. Despite the limited surviving evidence from 2008, Nationsquid decided he wouldn’t give up without a fight. He made do with what he had, and using the few clues that do exist, he was able to determine that the video was made no more than two weeks before it was posted (between 2/12/2008 and 2/26/2008).
June 25, 2009: Michael Jackson’s death breaks the web. On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson, the renowned King of Pop, died at 2:26 p.m. Pacific Time (5:26 p.m. Eastern Time), at the age of 50. Eighteen minutes later, at 5:44 p.m. Eastern Time, TMZ wrote the earliest news report about Michael’s untimely death. TMZ staff were located just outside the hospital where Michael Jackson died, allowing TMZ to be “fast” at covering the story. Due to TMZ’s reputation as a questionable or unreliable source, people rushed to Google to confirm if the story was true. Web traffic was unprecedented. Roughly 5 million searches for “Michael Jackson” were made that day; prior to 6/25/2009, no search query was searched that many times in one day. Google initially believed it was under a DDOS attack; for about half an hour, you could not search for “Michael Jackson,” and attempting to do so would result in an error message. Google then understood the situation and reversed the ban, allowing “Michael Jackson” to be searched again.

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Sources

Sylveon Turner, Cohen Bramall, Nationsquid. "How Michael Jackson Broke The Internet" — Fox News, August 29, 2022
Dolly Parton, Nationsquid. "How Username 666 Became YouTube’s First Urban Legend" — CNN, June 25, 2023