On a Sunday afternoon in August, thousands of users found themselves momentarily cut off from one of the internet's most vital institutions — the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine serves as the web's long memory, preserving what the world would otherwise allow to vanish. The disruption, which began around 3:44 p.m. Eastern time on August 16, resolved by Monday morning, though the Archive offered no explanation for what had occurred. In an age when digital history can be erased with a keystroke, even a brief silence from the place that remembers everything carries a particular weight.