38% of webpages from 2013 have disappeared from the Internet

We’ve probably all encountered the infamous 404 error message at some point during our browsing. Maybe you were looking for some old forum you used to hang out on or some other handy website, but came across a dead link. They say everything on the internet lasts forever, but new research from the Pew Research Center shows that’s not quite the case.

According to the research, 38 percent of web pages that existed in 2013 were inaccessible in October 2023. Nearly a quarter of all news articles on the web, 23 percent, contain at least one dead link, whether it’s a high or low-traffic site. In the case of US government websites, 21 percent of pages have at least one dead link.

Dead links are also evident on the internet’s own encyclopedia, Wikipedia. 54 percent of Wikipedia pages have at least one dead link in their reference lists.

The loss of information is also evident on social media. Nearly a fifth of all posts on Twitter, or X as the platform is now called, were inaccessible just months after they were posted. In 60 percent of cases, the account that posted the post had been made private, suspended or deleted altogether from the social media platform.

Posts in certain languages are taken down much more often than average. Nearly half, 49 percent, of all X posts made in Turkish, as well as 42 percent of posts in Arabic, were inaccessible just three months later.

So if you see something on the internet that you really want to access much later, it might be worth saving it to your own computer.