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Early morning fire causes service interruptions for Internet Archive

The Internet Archive [Photo: Tito Perez / Flickr CC]
The Internet Archive [Photo: Tito Perez / Flickr CC]
A building owned by the Internet Archive was involved in an early morning two-alarm fire in San Francisco on Wednesday according to local media reports.

The San Francisco Examiner reported a bookstore was destroyed in a two-alarm fire located at a building inside the city’s Richmond District. Eight people were displaced as a result of the blaze.

The building is owned by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which operates a giant repository of public domain media and the widely-used Wayback Machine, which preserves over 340 billion copies of websites dating back to the mid-1990s.

The Internet Archive tweeted Wednesday morning that the building housed a “scanning center” used by the website. The library’s main building and data are reported to be safe.

A spokesperson for the website said “unscheduled interruptions” to Internet Archive services were possible throughout the day as a result of the fire.

The website is asking people to make donations as a way of helping to rebuild the structure lost in the blaze.

San Francisco Examiner: Eight displaced in early morning fire

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About the Author:

Matthew Keys

Matthew Keys is an award-winning journalist with more than 10 years of experience covering the business of television and radio broadcasting, streaming services and the overall media industry. In addition to his work as publisher of The Desk, Matthew contributes regularly to StreamTV Insider and KnowTechie, and has worked for several well-known news organizations, including Thomson Reuters, McNaughton Newspapers, Grasswire, Comstock's magazine, KTXL-TV and KGO-TV. Matthew is a member of IRE, a trade organization for investigative reporters and editors, and is based in Northern California.

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