Deathwatch

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The Deathwatch is a central indicator of websites and networks that are shutting down and serves 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 and on Category:Closing projects.

Watchlist

Getting things done

Current Projects contains the up-to-date projects that are in progress. This small table keeps track of smaller projects by individual members.

Website Closing date Project status User Archiving Status Details Archives Archive Date Archive Format
ArchiveBot Saved Downloaded website, dev and blog subdomains .warc.gz
Various Saved Downloaded website, forums, skins/plugins [1] 2013-11 .warc.gz
Quick.io [2] 2013-12-31 Closing User:Arkiver Saved Downloaded the main website and the subdomains of the main website COMING 2013-12-13 .warc.gz
widgetbox [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 2014-03-28 Closing User:Arkiver In progress... Downloading all the websites 2013-12-19 - present .warc.gz
TechNet [10] 2014-09-30 Closing User:Arkiver In progress... Downloading full website .warc.gz

Pining for the Fjords (Dying)

  • Viddy and Epic, video sharing services acquired by Fullscreen will both be shut down on December 15, 2014.
  • Relay.im was bought by Kik and closes on December 15, 2014.
  • thatguywiththeglasses.com gets replaced by channelawesome.com on December 17, 2014.
  • Roon (roon.io) will meet it's doom on December 31, 2014.
  • Yahoo! is destroying more sites. Yahoo! Directory will shut down on December 31, 2014.
  • nRelate is closing on December 31, 2014.
  • Samsung Video Hub and WatchON shut down on December 31, 2014.
  • HP will be shutting down webOS cloud services on January 15, 2015.
  • Brace.io has been aquired by Squarespace and shuts down on January 19, 2015.
  • Mail.in.com will send its last mail on March 5, 2015.
  • Hiveminder will shut down on April 30, 2015.
  • Ovi Store's infrastructure is slowly rotting away.
  • 20 newspapers in Quebec will shutdown in the coming weeks. Here's a list [11] of those still up that needs to be archived ASAP.
  • Rue Frontenac was a website created during a newspaper lockout in Canada back in 2009. It was saved here , but I'm not sure if anybody is maintaining it. Copy ?
  • The Grid (magazine in Toronto) printed its last issue on July 3rd 2014 (see here) not sure how long the site will stay up.
  • Blip.tv will be removing accounts/videos on September 1st, 2014.
  • 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.
  • LEGO has a bad habit of deleting Flash games and other materials from their sites. Some of them still lie in pieces on cache.lego.com, awaiting their deletion. Fortunately, some games are still available to play on BioMediaProject or 4T2 Portfolio.
  • WordChamp was supposed to have shut down on June 30, 2013, later changed September 15, 2013, but is still up and running.
  • Readmill, a social e-reader thing, is closing its doors on July 1, 2013. They have quite a few user pages documenting who read what, who says what and what people think of books.
  • 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).
  • Google has quite a few old pages on their servers which haven't been updated in a long time. Might be a good idea to save these before they disappear.
  • Like Google, Nintendo of Japan has its share of ancient pages, like this one.
  • The Pirate Bay (http://www.thepiratebay.org/[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) 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 in 2010 has laid off 40% of staff and seems to be running out of money [14]. There is certainly some networks worth archiving among the 2 million networks[15] they host. Grouply[16] and Posterous[17] say they are going to offer migration tools.
  • 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.
  • As of 2014, ScraperWiki Classic is now read-only. But don’t worry! You can transfer this scraper to Morph.io if you want to continue editing it.
  • Convozine hasn't been active lately. Their last reply to a support question was in 2012, their last update in the "News" section was December 2011, and their last blog post was in January 2013. (See [18] and [19].)
  • ownlog.com - once one of the most popular and oldest blog platform in Poland seems to be dying slowly - no development and actualizations except most critical maintenance. Archiving project in progress

Other endangered species and misc ideas

We have even more small tidbits of information at Deathwatch/Misc.

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.

Dead as a Doornail

Because we know better

2014

  • December 12: BigPond Music shut down.
  • December 12: Allgame.com ran out of quarters. It was saved with ArchiveBot here (and available in the Wayback).
  • December 10: ZipList got zipped up.
  • December 2: Verizon shut down SugarString.
  • November: Jux went down before their official shutdown date, November 30, 2014.
  • November 30: Tree Puncher (Minecraft server host) got chopped down.
  • November 1: Easel shut down.
  • November 1: Qwiki slowed down.
  • October 30: Listn was shut down by Beatport.
  • October 24: Haivl.com, Vietnam's 9gag equivalent, shut down by the government authorities.
  • October 11: OhLife became NoLife.
  • October 1: Quizilla fizzled away.
  • September 30: Verizon Personal Web Space shut down.
  • September 30: Orkut got kut, Google thankfully left a public archive.
  • September 30: Yahoo! Education dropped out.
  • September 30: Petition Online shut down.
  • September 30: The National Atlas died.
  • August 31: Svpply and Want by Svpply were shut down.
  • August 31: The Yahoo! Contributor Network is destroyed by Yahoo!.
  • August 15: Heello said goooodbye.
  • August 10: Fotopedia leaves a photo finish.
  • August 5: Justin.tv shuts down completely.
  • August 1: Yahoo! Voices, formerly Associated Content, is shut up by Yahoo!.
  • July/August: Potential massive Quebec newspaper shutdown around August 2, 74 newspapers were bought by Transcontinental.
  • July 31: Shortmail shut down.
  • July 31: Snapdisk got snapped.
  • July 31: Yahoo! Shine went dark.
  • July 31: Pinterest acquires Icebergs.com
  • June 30: Hungarian iWiW social network closes; data not available from this date at all.
  • June 30: Me2Day, a Twitter-like social network, kicks the bucket.
  • June 15: Rawporter enters "into an exclusive business partnership", deletes user photos and videos (which we rescue.)
  • June 1: Ubuntu One shuts down, gives its users until July 31 to grab their data.
  • May 20: Nintendo shut down Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (except for the Wii and DSi Shop Channels).
  • May 6: Userscripts.org mysteriously vanished. A mirror popped up not long after.
  • April: JDEREF.com is served a takedown notice by Oracle.
  • April 30: qik.com shut down.
  • April 18: Twitter Music shuts down.
  • April 15: Beats shuts down MOG.
  • April 7: Vizify.com was acquired by Yahoo!. Bios were deleted on April 7, 2014. (Users could opt-in to extend date to September 4, 2014.)
  • March 31: IntoNow, a Yahoo! acquisition, will ceased to function.
  • March 31: Mochi Media realizes Flash is dead and the game is over.
  • March 17: doo shut down.
  • March 11: Intel AppUp shut down.
  • March 3: My Opera closes its member profiles.
  • February: Videogum is shutting down.
  • February 28: Outbox shuts down to rebuild itself.
  • February 21: Yahoo! crashed Cloud Party.
  • 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 [21] 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. [22]

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.[23] [24] [25], rest lost
  • December 12: Hyves closes it social network, but it's now got games!
  • November 18 (and back through 2012): Disney nuked a bunch of online games: Pixie Hollow Online, Cars Online, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Toontown Online. The futures of the large fan forums and an extremely completist wiki are doubtful. [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] The Pixie Hollow fan forum specifically announced that they will not be archived, and the Cars Online forum seems to have a similar warning, while the other forums for the shut down games will apparently be migrated into this: [32]
  • November 11: Bre.ad is dead.
  • November 7: Dopplr drops out from the web.
  • November 1: Zapd deletes its user data from the website.
  • November 1: iGoogle shuts down.
  • November: Bitmit, a Bitcoin marketplace, shut down.
  • November: 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. [33] Archive Team says to just say No.
  • 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.
  • September 1st: Thebox.bz, a TV torrents tracker/site.
  • September: Freeblog.hu closes without noticing it's users. Unknown number of blogs lost.
  • 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 28: Nintendo shuts down all of it's WiiConnect24 services, except for the Mii Channel, Wii Shop Channel, Mario Kart Wii Channel, and the Wii Speak Channel.
  • 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."
  • June: 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.
  • April 30: Posterous, a blogging and life streaming platform, shut down its "Posterous Spaces" to focus on Twitter.
  • April 30: 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 31: Zug.com, a comedy website running since 1995 closed down, and replaced all its pages with a goodbye image.
  • March 29: http://wrathofheroes.warhammeronline.com/ Play 4 Free Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes (WOH) shut down
  • March 25: Epinions locked out its users.
  • March 24: The OpenSolaris Hub and all sites under opensolaris.org, including the site hosting the OpenSolaris source code, were decommissioned by Oracle. OpenSolaris was 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 28: 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.
  • February: Regretsy shuts down.
  • January 31: Do.com shuts down.
  • January: http://go.to, an URL shortener, has all of its domains on sale on Sedo. No official word just yet, though.

2012

  • October 29: 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.)
  • August 17: 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.
  • August: Parodius Networking, which hosts numerous web sites related to classic video game platforms, died
  • July 30: 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.
  • July 1: 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...
  • June 30: 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". [34][35]
  • April 30: Google Wave shut down on April 30th.
  • April: convore.com shut down in April 2012. The site hosted IRC conversations, and involved a lot of JavaScript.
  • February: Hungarian free hosting provider Eplanet stops free service as of February 2012; unknown number of pages disappeared and probably deleted.
  • January 19: 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.

2011

  • Late October/November: 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).
  • May 31: MyPhotoAlbum.com closed on May 3, 2011 and deleted everything on May 31, 2011. Users who heard about the closure were given the options of either transferring their photos and videos over to dotPhoto.com or purchasing a DVD with their content for $15.00.
  • April 16: 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.
  • March 31: Yahoo! Video shut down on March 31st, 2011 and was reborn as a video portal.
  • March 16: 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.[37]
  • February 22: 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.
  • January 17: The Sims Carnival: [38]
  • January: 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."

2010

  • December 17: 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[39][40].
  • December: 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.
  • November: 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.
  • October 31: 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: [41] isweb itself (paid hosting!) will shut down in May 2012. [42]
  • September/October: Vox shut down at the end of September 2010.
  • Mid-2010: JuniorNet, a subscription based online portal for children, was quietly shut down nearly a decade after it dot-bombed and was acquired by former employees.
  • April/May: 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.
  • March 31: Extra.hu, largest free hosting Hungarian hosting provider goes paid-only; deletes unknown number of free sites on 31 March 2010.
  • March 1: Storytlr, a lifestreaming site, stopped hosting March 1st 2010.
  • March: 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.

2009

  • December 6: 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.
  • November: 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
  • October 31: 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. [43]
  • October 26: GeoCities: Shock! Repeat Offender Yahoo announced that it would close GeoCities "later this year...We'll send you more details this summer." [44]. The plug was pulled on October 26th 2009. See the Geocities project page for more details.
  • August 31: Microsoft's SoapBox has announced it is getting off said soapbox on August 31, 2009. [45].
  • August 30ish: 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.
  • August 24: Microsoft's Popfly [46] pops off into nowhere on August 24, 2009.
  • July 13: Yahoo! 360 announces [47] 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.
  • June 25: 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.
  • June 15: 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.
  • May 31: Rejaw, a microblogging platform, has announced that it will be shutting down on May 31 2009 [48]. It's gone.
  • May 21: MSN QnA Beta closed on May 21 [49]
  • April 20: 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. [50]. It did.
  • April 17: 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.
Did we say upline? We meant offline.
  • March 31: It doesn't get more ironic than this: Upline, a HP-owned online backup service, is being shut down.[51] 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!
  • March 31: Google acquired Etherpad on 4th December, 2009 and immediately announced a March 2010 content deletion date. After community pressure, Google has decided to open source the Etherpad codebase, keeping the service alive until then. The site closed down shortly after. Fortunately there are now are numerous alternatives.
  • March 30: 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?
  • March 25: 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. [52]
  • March 20: 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. [53] Things looked so promising in 2006: [54] Oh, and sadly, all your music you downloaded from them will stop working within 30 days or less. [55]
  • March 17: 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. [56] 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.
  • March 11: 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.
  • March 6: 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
  • Sometime between February 28th and March 23d: music.download.com was redirected to Last.fm. The free music it offered does not seem to have been transferred, however (the band Ancient Teknologi had several tracks available on music.download.com, but only one available on Last.fm). As of 28 February, it claimed to have 111.052 MP3s.
  • February 28: Lycos Europe shut down their Tripod hosting service on February 28, 2009. [57] [58] Note that Lycos Europe are distinct from Lycos.com. Lycos Europe is also shuttering the social networking site Jubii as of February 15, 2009. [59] A Danish version of the site will remain open for the time being.
  • February 27: 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.
  • February 23: 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. [61]
  • January 31: 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!
  • January 28: 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.
  • January 28: Culture11 ran out of money.[62]
  • January 27: Yahoo Pets was shut down and redirected with absolutely no notice around January 27, 2009. [63]
  • January 17: totse.com closed its doors on January 17, 2009. As of Jan 20th, a mirror exists, alongside a repository of the totse text files.
  • January 15: Ficlets.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [64]
  • January 15: Circavie.com (owned by AOL) has announced they are closing on January 15, 2009. [65]
  • January 14: Several Google services have shut down. [66] Most importantly, Google Video stopped accepting new uploads (to avoid competition with Google-owned YouTube), and Google Catalog Search was erased.
  • January 11: Co.mments.com closed down on January 11, 2009.
  • January 9: 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.)
  • January 6: Electronic Gaming Monthly has recently shut its doors. [67]

2008

Biggest Botched Shutdowns of 2008

The full extent of warning AOL gave about shutting down Hometown.
  • October 27: 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. [68]

Other deaths of 2008

  • December 31: 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.
  • December 31: Lively, a 3D Avatar space experiment, was killed in a really crappy way by Google on December 31, 2008.
  • December 27:Mixwit said goodbye on December 27, 2008. [69]
  • December 23: Castle Cops put away their badges on December 23, 2008. [70]
  • December 19(?): Google Research Datasets, shut down on December 19(?), 2008. [71]
The last person at Yahoo! Kickstart turning off the lights.
  • December 18: Yahoo! Kickstart, a social network for college students revealed in 2007 [72] got expelled on about December 18, 2008. [73]
  • December 16: 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. [74]
  • December 15: Pownce was closed on December 15, 2008.
  • December 8: 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!
  • December 3: Yahoo Live! died on December 3, 2008. [75]
  • October 31: OurWorld slipped into history on October 31, 2008.
  • October 29: 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. [76]
  • September 29: ScribbleWiki wikis go offline. Apparently their servers crashed and they didn't have a backup.
  • September 28: Yahoo! Mash, a social networking site, became mush on September 28, 2009, after 30 days warning. [77]
  • September 26: Uber.com was a social blog site that died. [78]
    • Not too be confused with the ridesharing service of the same name, which now owns the domain name uber.com.
  • September 18: Wallop, Microsoft's attempt at starting a social network, died on September 18, 2008. All that remains is a few Facebook apps. [79] [80]
  • May 21: Virtual Magic Kingdom closed its gates on May 21, 2008. [81] 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.
  • February 14: Think Secret was killed by Apple and shut down on February 14, 2008. [82]
  • July 31: Social.fm couldn't stand up to Last.fm, and died. [83]
  • May 15: Brijit.com, a news aggregation site, closed on May 15, 2008. It might be closed for good. [84]
  • February: 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. [85]

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)

Eleventh Hour Reprieves and Reanimations

  • Video host Viddler announces in an e-mail newsletter that they're shutting down free accounts on March 11, 2014. But Archive Team kicked in and began to suck up the place until the owners told us to stop. Videos won't be permanently deleted.
  • 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[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]. 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[89] 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."[90] In December 2009, it was announced that the "social bookmarking" site Mister Wong has acquired cli.gs and are keeping it running.[91] 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.
  • Earbits bites the dust on June 16, 2014, but comes back to life on June 19th, 2014. In between, we grabbed ~130GB of images and ~130k MP3s.
  • Filefront.com is closing up shop [92]. 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 [93], 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[94]. 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 [95]. 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 [96]
  • JPG Magazine announced it would shut down on January 5, 2009 [97], 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.
  • KeygenJukebox, which shut down in 2014, has recently popped back up.
  • 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[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]) 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)

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