I’m not sure that people who aren’t in academia know how disruptive the loss of Internet Archive is for us.
I’ve been working on a big project all week, and suddenly losing access to the dozens of out-of-print and out of date radio astronomy books that my library doesn’t have has thrown a massive wrench in the works. A lot of them are pretty hard to pirate, too! Most of what the IA has and does is stuff that most people will never have a reason to seek and nobody has a financial incentive to store, and that’s precisely why it’s so valuable.
Hey just adding from the comments, OP clarified IA is not GONE. It’s just down right now due to a malicious hacking incident. The information in the archives is still there, just inaccessible to the public right now.
The IA workers are currently slowly working to bring it back up, but are moving slow and cautious so as to avoid further issues, and hopefully implement security measures to make something like this less likely to happen again.
Do not despair, unless you have a current research project that is.
The (hopefully temporary) loss of the Internet Archive has negatively affected my daily life. There is music on there I can’t find anywhere else, books and films and radio broadcasts that simply don’t exist elsewhere online. There are research materials there that I need for my wip and it will be a lesser work without access to that information. It’s a crucial keystone of the online ecosystem and its absence is real and noticeable