India has cut off access to the Internet Archive, a San-Francisco-based website that hosts the popular Wayback Machine service. Its a twenty-year old digital archive of the world’s publicly accessible web pages.

Users who tried reaching the archiving service last night encountered an error message: “Your requested URL has been blocked as per directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India” – a notice that has been used in the past when high courts across India ordered the blocking of a particular webpage.

The Wayback Machine has over the last decade become a useful tool to get around media and government censorship as it allows users to view archived or deleted web pages. Authoritarian countries often seek to remove contentious online content or rapidly change existing webpages, which is when internet users turn to the Wayback Machine for help.

In 2015, the Russian government blocked the Wayback Machine in an effort to reportedly curtail access to a single saved webpage that criticised the government.