Deathwatch

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The Deathwatch is meant to be a central indicator of websites and networks that are shutting down, or to serve as an indicator of what happened to particular sites that shut down quickly. New sites should be added in chronological order, newest death date first. Forward-looking death dates should be added to the first list only. Sites large enough to warrant additional information will receive a dedicated page, linked from here.

Watchlist

See also: Category:Closing projects.

Current Projects contains the sites for which any actual work is already started.

Pining for the Fjords (Dying)

Website Closing date Project status User Archiving Status Details Archives Archive Date Archive Format
WinAmp [1] [2] [3] [4] 2013-12-20 Closing User:Arkiver In progress... Download full website and other domains .warc.gz
Archivebot Saved Downloaded website, dev and blog subdomains .warc.gz
Various Saved Downloaded website, forums, skins/plugins [5] 2013-11 .warc.gz
Quick.io [6] 2013-12-31 Closing User:Arkiver Saved Downloaded the main website and the subdomains of the mainwebsite COMING 2013-12-13 .warc.gz
My Opera [7] 2014-03-01 Closing User:Mithrandir(?) In progress... Initial grab of files (6.2 GB) [8] .warc.gz
widgetbox [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] 2014-03-28 Closing User:Arkiver In progress... Downloading all the websites 2013-12-19 - present .warc.gz
TechNet [16] 2014-09-30 Closing User:Arkiver In progress... Downloading full website .warc.gz
  • Nakido (site) claims to be a "time capsule" that will "host your files for decades" - except it's a commercial enterprise selling premium acounts, and uses a proprietary P2P platform for delivery. What could possibly go wrong?
  • Gatsby, not sure whether to file this here or under "Dead as a Doornail". Frontpage says that it's dead, but it's unclear whether hosted content is still available. Awaiting response as to what happened to the data.
  • Bitmit, a Bitcoin marketplace, will shut down in two weeks.
  • WordChamp was supposed to have shut down on June 30, 2013, but appears to be up and running.
  • These sites are getting an update in the next few months:
    • Lincs FM, Trax FM, Rutland Radio [www rutlandradio.co.uk - spam filter on here blocked this url], Dearne FM, Rother FM, Compass FM, KCFM 99.8, Ridings FM. All are getting an update, so you might want to back these up; not sure what the best means are, but making a mirror of Lincs FM Group websites is good for historical reasons.
  • Piczo, a social network for teens, has announced that it's shutting down.
  • The Centralstation Community has closed. The site is a UK-based social network for artists and creatives that provides hosting for content and portfolio. Users are being advised to back up their work as the new version of their platform will rely on existing media hosting sites like Flickr, Vimeo, and Soundcloud.
  • Groklaw will no longer be posting new articles, "due to government monitoring of the internet, particularly e-mail." Whether or not its archives will remain online is unclear, although it does seem rather unlikely it will 100% disappear. OTOH, better safe than sorry.

Pre-emptive Alarmbells (Likely To Die)

  • Archive Team officially proclaims Yahoo! the least trustable host and its arch-enemy. Prove us different, Yahooligans. Or... don't. Expect anything in this list and this list to shutdown (if it already hasn't).
  • The Polish social network Grono.net has disappeared, replaced by a file hosting service grono.net.pl on July 1, 2012. Most content from the old site was supposed to be migrated, but, according to a message on the main page, technical difficulties have delayed the migration by one or two weeks. It's getting increasingly late...
  • Going to call this one before it even starts, friends: Legacy Locker promises lifetime control of your data and return of your data to loved ones for just $300 for "lifetime", or $30/year. [17] Archive Team says to just say No.
  • The Pirate Bay (http://www.thepiratebay.org/[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]) still having persistent legal problems. The tracker went down in November, but the site still serves torrents and magnet links. If a torrent is lost, it becomes impossible to connect to other computers distributing the shared files. Considering that there are links to TPB on THIS VERY PAGE, this is pretty dang important. Thankfully, the magnet links and entire siterips have now been made, though keeping them updated is sure to be a pain.
  • Ning has laid off 40% of staff and seems to be running out of money [18]. There is certainly some networks worth archiving among the 2 million networks[19] they host. Grouply[20] and Posterous[21] say they are going to offer migration tools.
  • Omploader, an anonymous file upload site, has announced that they are about $2500 in the hole on hosting costs, and that there is possibility of their shutting down if donations do not improve. It stands to reason that there are some files among their database that are worth saving. An attempt to contact the administrator for more information and to be given a dump of the site was made, and he responded saying he'd be happy to rsync a copy of the data after some legal issues have been settled.
  • go.to, an URL shortener, has all of its domains on sale on Sedo. No official word just yet, though.
  • debates.oireachtas.ie on September 18th, 2012 the Houses of Oireachtas website announced that it would no longer be updating its XMl data for Irish parliamentary debates (1919-2012). Access to pre-existing data is still available, but is likely to disappear, if the current trend continues. It would be useful to at least capture the XML data that is there, while it is still available.

Other endangered species and misc ideas

  • Encyclopedia Astronautica is the most comprehensive collection of the history of space travel. Period. Seriously, the official NASA history folks will refer you this website if they can't answer your questions. However, Mark Wade (the sole creator/maintainer) abandoned his blog at the end of 2007, and the Encyclopedia has not been updated since May of 2008, despite much happening in the space exploration world since then.
  • h2g2 - "H2G2 is a constantly expanding, user-generated guide to life, the universe and everything. The site was founded in 1999 by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams." There are plans to buy h2g2 from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A80173361).
  • Various Image Boards - not the short-lived 4chan clones but the more permanent ones like www.zerochan.net (as of today it has over 1.6 million images, all easily available like this: www.zerochan.net/1627488), Pixiv.net, minitokyo.net
  • JoshW's video game music archive (links on http://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=26929). Not a "large" site but many many gigs of 7zipped WAVs
  • Suggestion: An archive of .gif and .swf preloaders? Kuro 19:49, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
    • We can extract all the .gif files from the GeoCities archive and compare them using md5sum to discard dupes. Emijrp 19:58, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Set up an FTP hub which AT members can access and up/down finished projects.
  • Track the 100+ top twitter feeds, as designated by one of these idiot Twitter grading sites, and back up on a regular basis the top twitter people, for posterity.
  • Groklaw has a project proposal that we could help with. - Jason
    • Now that Groklaw is dead, a mirror ought to be made soon. (Especially because their robots.txt blocks the Wayback Machine.) --Mithrandir 20:28, 21 August 2013 (EDT)
  • Archive the shutdown announcement pages on dead sites.
    • this is being done in every wiki page, pasting the announcement, and archiving when possible at WebCite. Emijrp 19:33, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
  • RSS Feed with death notices. - Jason
  • Twitter profile might be a good way to broadcast new site obituaries. - psicom
  • TinyURL and similar services, scraping/backup - Steve
    • highlight services that at least allow exporting data (Diigo that I know of). Next "best" - services that have registeration and enable viewing your URL / saving them by e.g. saving as HTML (tr.im). Etc. --Jaakkoh 05:39, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
    • see urlteam. Emijrp 19:33, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Symphony could potentially be used for archiving structured XML/RSS feeds to a relational database - Nick
  • A Firefox plugin for redirecting users to our archive when they request a site that's been rescued. - ???
    • good idea, the problem is that the archives are not hosted as the original, but packed. Emijrp 19:32, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
    • As some like what you propose already exists, this called MAFIAAFire Redirector (but that only redirects links from domains that have been seized by governments to backup sites) so if anyone wants to do this project, can be start by reviewing how this works extension. Although the files and pages are not hosted on a server as the original, but that all are packed, I read that Heritrix (the Internet Archive’s web crawler) by default the web resources that inspects are stored in a Arc archive, and perhaps could do something similar, but using bzip2, 7z, rar format archives or a combination of the above to manage the resources of a web. --Swicher 07:23, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Archives of MUD, MUSH, MOO game sites and related information. They won't all be around forever. --Auguste 13:59, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
    • I'm keeping an eye out for, and archiving sites like LambdaMOO.info, which are either closing down or may be at risk. --Auguste 13:59, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
  • YTMND Zachera 20:06, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
  • WikiWikiWeb - The first wiki, is still a valuable source of information on programming patterns and related topics. It's still active, but I'm not sure how much. It's been going since 1995 so its got real historical value. Plus it's all text and wouldn't take much space. The owner Ward Cunningham might be amenable to providing a copy, so I'd suggest contact first.
    • I've done this and linked the dump from WikiTeam. -- Ca7
  • Electronics datasheets: this, this, this and this for example. Many of these datasheets are already very hard to find (esp. for older and rarer parts, e.g. those required to emulate old computer systems) and the sites are often in China, Russia or other countries that might give problems in the future. Lots of data to grab, and many of these sites only have very slow bandwidth, so it might be good to start archiving them early. --Darkstar 23:47, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
  • ElfQuest Comics. They've recently all been scanned (6500 pages+) and are available here. They're hidden behind a Flash-based viewer though so someone would first have to decompile that to get to the links. --Darkstar 20:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
    • Working on getting this finished up, done downloading all the images, just have to package it up. Underscor 22:35, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
  • TechNet Archive: here "Technical information about older versions of Microsoft products and technologies. This information is scheduled to be removed soon." --Marceloantonio1 08:24, 9 June 2011 (UTC -3)
    • TechNet, and its big cousin, MSDN, are already being archived by other sites. For example, http://betaarchive.com[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] has archived a huge pile of them, including older ones from the late 90's)
  • Jux was going to get jammed on August 31, 2013, but not anymore. Still might be a good idea to keep them on the radar.
  • Archive as many file servers (FTP and HTTP) as possible.
  • Google Answers has no longer been accepting new questions for a while, and whether it will remain for a while is debatable.
  • Newgrounds is one of the largest collections of Flash games and movies on the Internet. It would be a shame if it all disappeared.
  • Yahoo! has decided to shut down more services, including Yahoo! Stars India, Yahoo! Neighbors, etc. These should be archived before they shut down. Also, yodel.yahoo.com seems to have been replaced by yahoo.tumblr.com, and should be archived too.
  • Archive every Google Doodle.
  • http://atheistpictures.com/
  • Not if this goes here, but I have an idea for development an program that facilitates the detection of links that belong to certain sites. What do I mean by this?, Is that in my experience with the work in Windows Live Spaces archiving (and other projects that I've only checked), a problem that apparently occurs frequently is the search of links to those sites whose content will be archived; for example, the links of a Windows Live Space was whatever.spaces.ive.com or a video on Google Video is video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-[video ID number] and so therefore the problem in question is , where do I find the links to pages, videos, articles or anything of a site X and later archive the contents of the same?. Perhaps the most obvious answer is using the API of one or more search engines, but the Google Web Search API is currently depreciated (besides being very limited), the Site Explorer API of Yahoo apparently stop working on Sept. 15 and to use the Bing's API is required to have a registered AppId (from other search engines I have not checked, but I mention these because they are the most used). Well, because the APIs of the search engines do come with some problems for this project, then I think a good solution would opt to use the automation of the web browser (that would be done the search/es required in (almost) all web searchers, traverse all the results found and to keep the corresponding links in somewhere). Maybe now some are wondering, why use that automatization if it can do likewise programmatically sending HTTP request to the server and parsing the HTML with the results?. Answer: It is true, it can also be done, but there is a "small" problem; search engines like Google and Bing have a dynamic HTML that when reviewing the source code of some of its results page, looks basically a mishmash of HTML and Javascript code hard to analyze, but this is solved with browser automatization because through this way the code of the search results page of the site would already be "served" for parsing because the browser interpret the code received from the server and convert this to commonplace HTML in RAM (or something) to illustrate this better I leave an example:
Clicking on the picture can read a very detailed description of the four screenshots that compose this (besides being able to observe the image to full resolution)
With this way of doing this also solves another detail; maintainability and adaptability of the code because the browser using automatization, all you have to do is indicate the search engine results page, the search term (which would something like site:whatever.com, inurl:.whatever.com/ and stuff like that), the tag where are the links results and what is the button "Next" (therefore this reduces the times of development and implementation for each particular search engine and without writing too much code). If anyone is still interested in the idea after that long explanation, then I will tell that between the browser automatization applications on which I have read, there are two that I have called attention, one is Watir (programmed in Ruby but is cross-platform and multibrowser) and Selenium Remote Control (also is cross-platform and multibrowser but unlike the previous one, this API supports C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby) so if anyone wants to realize this project, then can choose one of these applications to start (or other similar to the above). --Swicher 09:41, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Harmony Central User (-submitted) Reviews were around for over a decade and covered just about every musical instrument and related accessory commercially sold. Site updates have caused these to be offline, though admins say the data still exists. As far as can be determined, Archive.org has little if any of these reviews. This thread has the whole story. --Benbradley 20:41, 13 July 2013 (EDT)

Just When You Least Expect It

  • Archive Team keeps a list of healthy sites that could be fine today and not so hot tomorrow. We focus on ways to back your personal data off these sites so you don't put yourself at unnecessary risk.

Eleventh Hour Reprieves and Reanimations

  • Chanarchive.org - A site dedicated to saving select quality threads from 4chan, running since 2006 and containing 500GBs of important material. It has shut down entirely, as the owner was banned from Paypal and has no means of paying for the site in it's current state. In a 4chan thread, the owner explains that backups will be made available, but there is no guarantee of who, where, and for how long.
  • Berlios.de will shut down at end of 2011. The site hosts thousands of open source software projects (git, svn, bzr, mailing lists, bug tracking, etc). Instructions for exporting a project. Berlios is still open and they are now partnered with sourceforge to keep things running.
  • Citizendium's finances constantly cry for money[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]. Running a MediaWiki site is cheap and Sanger is not homeless, hence it's expected to survive. WikiTeam archives it on a regular basis.
  • Delicious[22] will be shutting down soon. The whole team was let go yesterday - 15 December 2010. Slashdot link. Delicious was acquired from Yahoo! in early 2011 by AVOS however all the prior content is gone.
  • Cli.gs, another URL shortening service, announced closure: "On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics."[23] In December 2009, it was announced that the "social bookmarking" site Mister Wong has acquired cli.gs and are keeping it running.[24] All aboard the TinyURL project.
  • Duck.co, the official DuckDuckGo community forums, transitioned to their own platform and moved all posts over from their old Zoho forum.
  • Filefront.com is closing up shop [25]. The site will be suspended on March 30, 2009. 1.5 Million files and 48+ TB of space gone just like that. UPDATE As of April 2, 2009, it looks like there may have been an 11th hour reprieve for Filefront. According to a message reportedly from the original founders of the service [26], the site has been re-acquired by them in order to prevent its proposed shuttering.
  • Formspring (now called spring.me) announced they'd be shutting down on April the 15th. It was, however, was acquired by new management on May 8, 2013, and saved from being shut down.
  • Google Video threatened to remove all hosted videos with two weeks' notice in April 2011. It backed down after criticism and an archive effort by the Archive Team.
  • Home of the Underdogs went under on Feb 9th[27]. There has been some passed along words by the site's owner, now working at an NGO, that an attempt to bring it back may happen. (She definitely has backups of the site.) A community-driven effort to revive the site is currently underway [28]. Backups were restored, and the remaining files (1,000+) collected from the community. As of Jan 4th 2010, HOTU is reporting that files are back online [29]
  • JPG Magazine announced it would shut down on January 5, 2009 [30], but the site lives lives on under new ownership. Feel free to download the torrent
  • Jux announced that they would be shutting down on August 31, 2013. UPDATE On July 17, 2013, Jux announced that they would not shut down, apparently due to financial support from one of their members.
  • MobyGames, the largest database of old game releases on the net, with huge amount of content found nowhere else. Was bought by GameFly in 2010 and received a new site design in September 2013, which made almost all contributors emigrate. Many site features have disappeared or became broken in the new design, and their large database of cover art and screenshots had problems loading. In December 2013, the site was bought by Blue Flame Labs, who have restored the old site design and managed to draw back pretty much all the contributors. It seems that the site is going back to full health again.
  • WebCite – Has a habit of crying for money, threatening it will stop accepting submissions. Since October 2013, the Wayback Machine archives pages on demand, hence there's no reason to use a site like WebCite that declares self at risk. It's expected that they'll send their data to Internet Archive if they ever really have to shut down.
  • Word Count Journal (http://www.wordcountjournal.com/about[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]) is shutting down on June 11, 2011 UPDATE The site is fully up and running. (checked on October 21, 2011) UPDATE2: Non-functional, but the website is up with this notice "Word Count Journal is no longer being supported." (checked on January 26th, 2012)

Dead as a Doornail

Because we know better

We don't even know when

  • Yahoo! shut down the y.ahoo.it URL shortener.

2014

  • February 7: Schemer.com shut down by Google. (Time of death: 2014-02-08 00:13:52,184 EST.)
  • January 21: DrawQuest and Canvas shuts down. moot writes his shut down notice.
  • ??? dl.tv [32] There is no new tech podcast on here for over a year. Good idea to start backing up all podcast on this site. Same for Crankygeeks. [33]

2013

  • December 26: Wretch and Yahoo! Blog is closed by Yahoo!.
  • December 21: ClanBase is no more. The company that bought the website in 2004, Global Gaming League, decided to "move on" after basically running the website into the ground.
  • December 20: WinAmp, home of the Winamp media player, shuts down.
  • December 18: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning closes.
  • December 15: Everpix, a photo-sharing service, shuts down.[34] [35] [36], rest Lost
  • December 12: Hyves closes it social network, but it's now got games!
  • November 11: Bre.ad is dead.
  • November 7: Dopplr drops out from the web.
  • November 1: Zapd deletes its user data from the website.
  • iGoogle is shutting down on November 1, 2013.
  • October 21: isoHunt was always going to shut down after an MPAA settlement. However, it did so earlier than expected to prevent archival efforts, claiming that 95% of torrents were available elsewhere. No mention of the metadata though.
  • September 30: OMGPOP shut down, and now redirects to Zynga's main site. There was a petition to stop it from closing, which did not gain much traction.
  • September 30: MSN TV, aka WebTV, no longer accessible.
  • August-September: FileDen.com, a file hosting website, suddenly shuts down, giving their users little to no warning.
  • August 31: Rockmelt shuts down after being acquired by Yahoo!.
  • August 21: Amplicate vanishes, leaves behind 502 Bad Gateway errors.
  • August 20: Catch closes its doors.
  • August 19: Wow! Cool Facts About Gaming shuts down, thankfully leaves everything up.
  • August 9: Google Latitude shut down.
  • August 5: Astrid is shut down after being acquired by Yahoo!.
  • July 31: All third party downloads disappear from Yahoo! Downloads.
  • July 25: Yahoo! Stars India is shut down.
  • July 24: Snapjoy, acquired by Dropbox in December 2012, is shut down.
  • July 19: Google shuts down Alfred.
  • July 9: Yahoo! Neighbors shuts down a day after it was supposed to.
  • July 8: AltaVista, one of the oldest search engines, shuts down.
  • July 1: FoxyTunes and Yahoo! RSS Alerts disappear from the web.
  • June 30: Yahoo! demolishes Yahoo! WebPlayer.
  • June 28: Yahoo! shuts down Axis, Browser Plus and Citizen Sports.
  • June 4: Adrenaline Vault, a video game review site, has this posted on their Facebook profile: "Over the past weekend hackers hit the site with a DoS attack. Everything had been wiped and with no backups, everything was lost. It has been decided that Avault will remain closed. Rest in Peace, Avault."
  • April 30th Posterous, a blogging and life streaming platform, shut down its "Posterous Spaces" to focus on Twitter.
  • April 30th Circalit decides in March that deleting is easier than migrating its prose-writing users.
  • April 20: Microsoft Collection Book, a site dedicated to collecting information about Windows betas, shuts down due to a C&D from Microsoft. It reopened on May 5 as The Collection Book.
  • March 31st shutdown. Zug.com, a comedy website running since 1995 closed down, and replaced all its pages with a goodbye image.
  • March 29th shutdown. http://wrathofheroes.warhammeronline.com/ Play 4 Free Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes (WOH)
  • March 24th shutdown. The OpenSolaris Hub and all sites under opensolaris.org, including the site hosting the OpenSolaris source code, are being decommissioned by Oracle. OpenSolaris is an open source computer operating system based on Solaris and originally created by Sun Microsystems. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the core software, and replaced the OpenSolaris distribution model with the proprietary Solaris Express.
  • February 28th Stickam, a major video chat service, shut down. Users were emailed and given the ability to download any recorded videos for 3 weeks in advance of the closing date.
  • January 31: Do.com shuts down.Lost

2012

  • Ponibooru, a famous My Little Pony-related imageboard, shut down by August 17. All of the images themselves (but not the comments) were available to download via torrents, though it is unknown if the torrents are still available. Currently the most popular/upvoted images are available via another imageboard, Derpibooru, but their copy is incomplete.
  • Parodius Networking, which hosts numerous web sites related to classic video game platforms, died in August 2012.
  • Kasabi, a data publishing platform created by Talis was announced to be closing on July 30, 2012. While the service has only been around for ~2 years it represents a unique look at services for Linked Data, and contains a variety of datasets. Kasabi has a blog post that announces the availability of datasets contained in Kasabi to ease archiving.
  • Gamecorner.pl, a Polish video game news portal, was closed in May, and later wiped entirely on October 29. The articles have been retained at the publisher's other video game portal, Polygamia.pl, but the article comments and the forums are gone (It also had user blogs, but they seemed to have been erased much earlier.)
  • "convore.com" shut down in April 2012. The site hosted IRC conversations, and involved a lot of JavaScript.
  • Google Wave shut down on April 30th.
  • The popular file hosting service Megaupload has been shut down in January 2012; with it, Megavideo too is gone. It was mainly used for copyright infringement, but lots of perfectly regular files were hosted on it.
  • Apple MobileMe, iDisk, iWeb, and included services. This major website and these services will shut down in 2012, simply because web hosting is boring and they want to focus on the exciting "iCloud".[37][38]

2011

  • The Insurgency Wiki is a wiki with a community that created multiple guides and raids for Anonymous, in a similar manner to Encyclopedia Dramatica. It's status has always been unclear, with many mirrors coming and going. But as of Feb. 22, 2012, the last mirror, Partyvan.info, looks like it has some damning database error. Just in case, the Bibliotheca Anonoma has made a full backup, including all available images available.
  • The wiki hosting site wik.is, hosted by MindTouch, shut down on the first week of January 2011; the explanation being that "in order to continue to support the growing needs of our MindTouch Express users, we are offering MindTouch Cloud", which "opens up additional features and functionality that are not available in Wik.is.". The only way you'd know all that is if you receive a warning e-mail from MindTouch. They offer to keep your site running by "upgrading to our paid Cloud version by filling out this short form."
  • The Sims Carnival: January 17th, 2011[39]
  • Microsoft closed Windows Live Spaces on March 16, 2011. Spaces owners had the option to migrate their blogs to WordPress or to make copies. As of January 4, 2011, they could no longer edit their existing Spaces.[41]
  • Yahoo! Video shut down on March 31st, 2011 and was reborn as a video portal.
  • Encyclopedia Dramatica shutdown on 16. April 2011 without warning. Ongoing reconstruction Efforts. A lot of Images and Articles are probably lost. (The replacement OhInternet is a very strongly sanitized Version of ED.) ED is claiming that they are in danger of shutting down. Despite the controversial nature of many articles hosted on the wiki, this would be a big loss of historical records.
    A lot of the Images and Pages are still missing. Help appreciated.

2010

  • Machinima.com was reworked in December 2010, and by "reworked" we mean massacred. Most notably, the forums were deleted, as well as tons of older articles.
  • The Symbian Foundation will shut down its websites, Twitter account, Facebook page, bug trackers and remove access to its source code on 17 Dec 2010[42][43].
  • It Died by Glenn Fleishman. a site dedicated to indicating sites that have died, itself died. (Keep the RSS Feed around in case that changes, though).
  • isweb lite, the Japanese Geocities, shut down on October 31. Thousands of personal homepages of artists and illustrators were deleted forever. A tiny sample of the pages deleted: [44] isweb itself (paid hosting!) will shut down in May 2012. [45]
  • Vox shut down at the end of September 2010.
  • Storytlr, a lifestreaming site, stopped hosting March 1st 2010.
  • Platinum, once a popular Finnish web site associated with electronic dance music, clubbing/raving, and the other related things was closed in March after been running for years. All the content posted to the forums of the site was, however, obtained and made available by Klubitus, another related portal popular in Finland.
  • Kid Radd was a notable and quite popular webcomic which vanished when AT&T discontinued their Worldnet service. Thankfully, an archive is available, e.g. here.
  • BrightFuse was a small social network started as a side venture by CareerBuilder.com in August 2009. It was quietly shutdown November of 2010 without much fanfare. At its height it has 100k users.

2009

  • favrd, a website that aggregated favorite tweets from twitter, abruptly shut down on December 6, 2009 with absolutely no warning, killing off thousands of highlighted entries added by group-consensus over significant months. As a reward for their efforts, founder Dean Allen wrote this helpful message: "Alas, stars on Twitter have become mere take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants. There are still lots of clever and funny things to read every day, but finding these is no longer a challenge â you already follow your sources. Sites like this one now serve mainly as fuel for emotional up-fuckedness in the guise of a game. Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why. Take care!" Advice to people who want to work with Dean Allen's projects in the future: don't.
  • here.is seems to permanently off-line. It ceased to re-direct email for some time ago and as per 11-23-09 it doesn't redirect even URLs any longer.
Discontinuedpedia
  • Microsoft Encarta, the online encyclopedia with a 15+ year history, is being shut down. The US version will shut down on October 31, 2009 and the Japanese version on December 31, 2009. [46]
  • GeoCities: Shock! Repeat Offender Yahoo announced that it would close GeoCities "later this year...We'll send you more details this summer." [47]. The plug was pulled on October 26th 2009. See the Geocities project page for more details.
  • Microsoft's SoapBox has announced it is getting off said soapbox on August 31, 2009. [48].
  • ArchNacho's & TortillaGodzilla's Quality ROMs, a site that hosted ROMs for NES, SNES, and Genesis games, which has announced its effective death back in January of 2006, is now finally completely inaccessible, both on its original domain (http://www.qualityroms.com), and on the site that the domain masked (http://home.no.net/qualrom/). Archive.org has mirrors of the site up through August 30, 2007, which is after all updates to the site ceased. All ROMs hosted on QualityRoms are included in the mirror and can be downloaded from there.
  • Microsoft's Popfly [49] pops off into nowhere on August 24, 2009.
  • Yahoo! 360 announces [50] that they are closing up shop on July 13, 2009. Of course, you can still register an account but that's the first thing you're told.
  • Imeem, a site for sharing music and convincing yourself that what you're hearing is good, announced on June 25, 2009 that they were "simplifying" things and deleting all user-generated photos and videos uploaded by users. They gave everyone five days to get their photos off, and then extended it to twenty days from the ensuing hue and cry. The uploaded videos had no way to extract them back.
  • Rejaw, a microblogging platform, has announced that it will be shutting down on May 31 2009 [51]. It's gone.
  • Jumpcut.com became the latest example of Yahoo!'s awesome respect for history and data, announcing the closure of the video hosting and editing site, for June 15, 2009. A software utility has been released to allow you to download the movies from Jumpcut. Otherwise, you are not in great shape - Yahoo says you can move your videos to Flickr, but Flickr cuts off at 90 seconds. A lot of homemade video is going to disappear.
  • MSN QnA Beta closed on May 21 [52]
  • Coghead, " a web-based service for building and hosting custom online database applications and a software as a platform 'utility computing' company", announced it had closed up on February 20, 2009, and that the site would go down permanently on April 20, 2009. [53]. It did.
  • Furl was a social bookmarking service that had been around since 2004. It was acquired by Diigo (announced on March 9), allowed people to opt into transferring their bookmarks to Diigo, and shut down on April 17. Diigo blog post; Techcrunch post.
  • Spiralfrog, "a FREE service that lets you download over 3 million songs and videos, legally and safely", pulled up stakes in the night and completely shut down on March 20, 2009. [54] Things looked so promising in 2006: [55] Oh, and sadly, all your music you downloaded from them will stop working within 30 days or less. [56]
Did we say upline? We meant offline.
  • It doesn't get more ironic than this: Upline, a HP-owned online backup service, is being shut down.[57] They almost immediately turned off the backup process, and then announced all your restorable data would go offline on March 31, roughly 30 days after announcement. Surprise!
  • Yahoo Briefcase, a positively ancient site run by Yahoo that provided you with 25 free megabytes of storage space for your junk, sent a mail to what were likely years-old contact addresses to tell them they had a little more than a month to get their files out, March 30, 2009. After that, the files would be deleted. What, Yahoo doesn't have a spare memory stick to store what must be the amount of files in this service for the next year?
  • Yahoo! Farechase, an airline fare aggregation and searching site, was shut down on March 25, 2009. It had previously been it's own company, founded in 1999, and purchased by Yahoo! in 2004. [58]
  • The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was put up for sale, but found no buyer, and the print edition stopped on March 17th 2009 after 146 years. [59] Initially, reports indicated it would shut down the website as well as the paper, but a plan was apparently in place to run a "skeleton crew" on an internet-only site, which continues to operate.
  • Videosift had a combination database and backup failure, losing: "All votes, ever. All member usernames who registered later than around 12 months ago. All member rankings. Your member profile info (e.g., bio, favorite sift, etc.), if any. All activity that happened on the site yesterday, March 11." This is unlikely to kill the site, but an awful lot of data was lost.
  • Scoopt, a "citizen journalism" site run by Getty images to allow the uploading of images by citizen journalists and the chance to be licensed to news organizations, announced they would no longer take any new imagery after February 6, 2009, and will shut down completely on March 6, 2009. Some content uploaders "may" be contacted about being absorbed into the main Getty site.
20090227.jpg
  • The Rocky Mountain News has shut down as of February 27, 2009. [60] We're watching to see what happens with the website (and the material, and the newspaper itself). With a 150 year history, there's a lot of backstory, and how this chronicler of history will end up, so too will many others. There is an excellent documentary about the last days of the Rocky Mountain News here.
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly has recently shut its doors. [61]
  • Culture11 ran out of money.[62]
  • Lycos Europe shut down their Tripod hosting service on February 28, 2009. [63] [64] Note that Lycos Europe are distinct from Lycos.com. Lycos Europe is also shuttering the social networking site Jubii as of February 15, 2009. [65] A Danish version of the site will remain open for the time being.
  • Windows Live shut down the MSN Groups on February 23. They extended their original date from February 21st to give Group owners the weekend to prepare. [66]
  • ma.gnolia.com had a catastrophic disk corruption/failure on January 31, 2009. From the message on the main site: "As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours." Ma.gnolia had an excellent export feature... hope you used it and did the backups they didn't!
  • Domino Magazine, a style/interior design magazine, announced that they were shutting down on January 28, 2009. My Deco File, one of the site's heavily used social bookmarking features (somewhat like delicious for images) will remain up for a few weeks to allow users to save their stuff.
  • Yahoo Pets was shut down and redirected with absolutely no notice around January 27, 2009. [67]
  • totse.com closed its doors on January 17, 2009. As of Jan 20th, a mirror exists, alongside a repository of the totse text files.
  • Ficlets.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [68]
  • Circavie.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [69]
  • Several Google services have shut down. [70] Most importantly, Google Video stopped accepting new uploads (to avoid competition with Google-owned YouTube), and Google Catalog Search was erased.
  • Co.mments.com closed down on January 11, 2009.
  • AOL Pictures said so long on January 9, 2009. To their credit, you can still yank your stuff into other photo services until June of 2009. (At least, according to their goodbye letter.)

2008

Biggest Botched Shutdowns of 2008

The full extent of warning AOL gave about shutting down Hometown.
  • Digitalrailroad.net, a photo hosting site, gave their users a 24-hour eviction notice on October 27, 2008. They shut down 10 hours after the 24-hour notice. [71]

Other deaths of 2008

  • Lively, a 3D Avatar space experiment, was killed in a really crappy way by Google on December 31, 2008.
  • Pingmag, the magazine from Tokyo about "Designing and Making things," simultaneously rang in the new year and checked out of existence on December 31, 2008.
  • Mixwit said goodbye on December 27, 2008. [72]
  • Castle Cops put away their badges on December 23, 2008. [73]
  • Google Research Datasets, shut down on December 19(?), 2008. [74]
The last person at Yahoo! Kickstart turning off the lights.
  • Yahoo! Kickstart, a social network for college students revealed in 2007 [75] got expelled on about December 18, 2008. [76]
  • Flip.com, a social network for teenage girls, shut down on December 16, 2008. Users were advised to print out their digital scrapbooks as backups. [77]
  • Pownce was closed on December 15, 2008.
  • I Want Sandy (WEBCITE) was shut down on December 8, 2008. A lot of people complained about this one, while others thanked the site for shutting down and wished the founder well!
  • Yahoo Live! died on December 3, 2008. [78]
  • OurWorld slipped into history on October 31, 2008.
  • BlogRush.com failed to provide bloggers with the traffic they so desperately desired, and the creator admitted on October 29, 2008 that his 4AM idea may not have been so brilliant. [79]
  • Wallop, Microsoft's attempt at starting a social network, died on September 18, 2008. All that remains is a few Facebook apps. [80] [81]
  • Yahoo! Mash, a social networking site, became mush on September 28, 2009, after 30 days warning. [82]
  • ScribbleWiki wikis go offline.
  • Virtual Magic Kingdom closed its gates on May 21, 2008. [83] The amount of broken hearts and anguish over this move was amazing, and a warning sign to any family-oriented site that encourages families to join up.
  • Think Secret was killed by Apple and shut down on February 14, 2008. [84]
  • Uber.com was a social blog site that died. [85]
  • Social.fm couldn't stand up to Last.fm, and died. [86]
  • Brijit.com, a news aggregation site, closed on May 15, 2008. It might be closed for good. [87]
  • Yahoo! Design, a showcase of designing and information aesthetics related to the Yahoo! properties, got revised into oblivion in February, 2008 as part of a 1,000 employee layoff. [88]

2007

2006

2005

  • http://IUMA.COM (Internet Underground Music Archive), of Santa Cruz, California, the actual first website to offer free hosting of bands including MP3 files of music offered by the bands, was mostly archived by John Gilmore before going down. At least one IUMA founder now has a copy of that archive. This ~800GB collection has been uploaded to an archiveteam staging server.

2004

2003

2002

2001

  • SixDegrees.com, a social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001
  • The Useless Pages (at IA)

Links

Other Sites Remember the Dead

Tragic

Humorous

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