It’s very strange. I went down this rabbit hole a few months ago and this HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702) was the best summary I could find of the situation.
TLDR: archive.is doesn’t play nice with its DNS results and Cloudflare refuses to fix it on their end.
This is the fault of archive.is — they’re using an outdated DNS load balancing approach that is inherently not robust. They’re mad at Cloudflare specifically but the reality is that there are many other similar failure scenarios.
The mature thing to do would be to switch to something like anycast IP routing, which is robust against issues like this.
I suspect the “problem” isn’t actually that big a deal to begin with, and the archive folks are making a mountain out of a molehill for philosophical reasons.
In other words they hate Cloudflare and will find any excuse to start a fight.
why does using cloudflare mess it up? how does that even work?