thearchivist.funGeoCities is deleted, and volunteers race to copy it
Yahoo closed GeoCities on 26 October 2009. The service had begun in 1994 under the name Beverly Hills Internet. Yahoo stopped new registrations in April 2009 and confirmed the closing date that June. Its FAQ was unusually blunt: the site was not being put aside but deleted, and anything its owners and readers had not backed up would not be recoverable. Archive Team, led by Jason Scott, treated the date as a deadline. Computerworld reported on 23 October that the group estimated GeoCities held about ten terabytes and that Scott had saved roughly 8,000 sites so far; the Archive Team wiki says harvesting ran from April to October 2009. The result circulated afterwards as a torrent of about 900 GB, and the Internet Archive ran a parallel effort that Yahoo's own closing page pointed to. GeoCities matters to this archive because it was a place where ordinary people built pages without a company asking them to. When it went, nothing in the pages themselves changed. The host simply stopped answering.
Context and provenance
Read the closing as a case study in who gets to decide what survives. Yahoo gave owners months of warning and a clear statement that deletion was permanent. Even so, the most complete copy came from volunteers, not from the owner of the data, and it was assembled in a rush. A rescued page keeps its words and pictures, but it loses the neighbourhood structure and the live links that once surrounded it.
To cite GeoCities, name the copy you actually used (a torrent, an Internet Archive capture or a mirror), the capture date where there is one, and the address the page had before 26 October 2009. A mirror that is online today may be gone tomorrow, as the Archive Team page itself records for several of them.
Transmission timeline
- 1994
GeoCities begins as Beverly Hills Internet.
- 2009-04
Yahoo announces that GeoCities will close and stops new registrations.
- 2009-06
Yahoo confirms 26 October as the closing date.
- 2009-10-26
Yahoo's announced closing day; the Archive Team wiki records pages going dark around midday Pacific on 27 October.
Why it matters
The deletion of a large personal-publishing host showed that a platform's public pages can be outlived only if someone outside the company copies them in time.
What remains uncertain
Sources differ by a day on when pages actually went dark (26 versus 27 October); the record uses the announced date. The ten-terabyte figure is an estimate, and no source here gives a verified count of sites saved.
Sources and evidence
- Computerworld: Yahoo GeoCities closes on Oct. 26
April 2009 announcement, June confirmation of 26 October, Yahoo FAQ wording, Archive Team's ten-terabyte estimate, founding as Beverly Hills Internet.
- Laughing Squid: Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities today
Yahoo's closing statement, Archive Team's GeoCities Project, Scott's Under Construction exhibit.
- Archive Team wiki: GeoCities
Harvest period April to October 2009, closing on 27 October at about 12:30 pm Pacific, the patched torrent, Internet Archive parallel project.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.