"Link rot" is the unfortunate phenomenon whereby online articles become populated by broken links - URLs that once led to active pages but now result in error messages or dead ends. A Pew Research study from 2024 showed that nearly 40% of links that existed in 2013 were no longer active. Such "digital decay" occurs across a broad diversity of webpages, from news and government sites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.
The Kyiv Post, one of Ukraine's leading English-language news outlets, covered the story, but no public record of its homepage exists in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for that day. A homepage snapshot - a viewable version of a page captured by the Wayback Machine's crawlers - does not appear until September 8, more than 24 hours after the attack.