Early morning fire causes service interruptions for Internet Archive

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